Freya Stark Quotes & Sayings

One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a healthy private pattern of one's own and I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism. — Freya Stark

We were not for underestimating magic - a life-conductor like the sap between the tree-stem and the bark. We know that it keeps dullness out of religion and poetry. It is probable that without it we might die. — Freya Stark

Words are the only arteries of thought our poor human body possesses ... — Freya Stark

The essence of travel is diffuse. It is never there on the spot as it were, but always beyond: its symbol is the horizon, and its interest always lies over that edge in the unseen. — Freya Stark

Advertisement ... has brought our disregard for truth into the open without even a figleaf to cover it. — Freya Stark

I have no reason to go, except that I have never been, and knowledge is better than ignorance. What better reason could there be for travelling? — Freya Stark

Things good in themselves ... perfectly valid in the integrity of their origins, become fetters if they cannot alter. — Freya Stark

Generalizations, one is told, are dangerous. So is life, for that matter, and it is built up on generalization - from the earliest effort of the adventurer who dared to eat a second berry because the first had not killed him. — Freya Stark

What I find trying in a country which you do not understand and where you cannot speak, is that you can never be yourself. — Freya Stark

It is a lean employment of time to brood on what might have happened along some other turning. — Freya Stark

Every frontier is doomed to produce an opposition beyond it. Nothing short of the universal can build the unfenced peace. — Freya Stark

There are, I sometimes think, only two sorts of people in this world - the settled and the nomad - and there is a natural antipathy between them, whatever the land to which they may belong. — Freya Stark

The beckoning counts, and not the clicking of the latch behind you. — Freya Stark

In one form or another, conscious or unconscious, we have all become propagandists; integrity alone can keep us truthful. — Freya Stark

The true call of the desert, of the mountains, or the sea, is their silence - free of the networks of dead speech. — Freya Stark

The main necessity on both sides of a revolution is kindness, which makes possible the most surprising things. To treat one's neighbor as oneself is the fundamental maxim for revolution. — Freya Stark

The world has become too full of many things, an over furnished room. — Freya Stark

Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle. — Freya Stark

Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature. — Freya Stark

I do like people who have not yet made up their minds about everything, who in fact are still receiving — Freya Stark

The symbol is greater than visible substance ... Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care. — Freya Stark

This is a great moment, when you see, however distant, the goal of your wandering. The thing which has been living in your imagination suddenly become part of the tangible world. It matters not how many ranges, rivers or parching dusty ways may lie between you; it is yours now for ever. — Freya Stark

From love one can only escape at the price of life itself; and no lessening of sorrow is worth exile from that stream of all things human and divine. — Freya Stark

The perpetual charm of Arabia is that the traveler finds his level there simply as a human being; the people's directness, deadly to the sentimental or pedantic, likes the less complicated virtues ... — Freya Stark

Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles. — Freya Stark

A part of all art is to make silence speak. The things left out in painting, the note withheld in music, the void in architecture - all are as necessary and as active as the utterance itself. — Freya Stark

Youth looks at its world and age looks through it; youth must get busy on problems whose outlines stand single and strenuous before it, while age can, with luck, achieve a cosmic private harmony unsuited for action as a rule. — Freya Stark

The thwarting of the instinct to love is the root of all sorrow and not sex only but divinity itself is insulted when it is repressed. — Freya Stark

Words are but drops pressed out of the lives of those who lived them. — Freya Stark

The artist's business is to take sorrow when it comes. The depth and capacity of his reception is the measure of his art; and when he turns his back on his own suffering, he denies the very laws of his being and closes the door on everything that can ever make him great. — Freya Stark

If we are strong, and have faith in life and its richness of surprises, and hold the rudder steadily in our hands. I am sure we will sail into quiet and pleasent waters for our old age. — Freya Stark

Monotony is not to be worshipped as a virtue; nor the marriage bed treated as a coffin for security rather than a couch from which to rise refreshed. — Freya Stark

We love those people who give with humility, or who accept with ease. — Freya Stark

It is only the unexpected that ever makes a customs officer think. — Freya Stark

Time is the sea in which men grow, are born, or die. — Freya Stark

Risk is the salt and sugar of life. — Freya Stark

Not wholly consciously, but not quite unconsciously, as far as I can remember, I determined to fashion my future as a sculptor his marble, and there was in it the same mixture of foresight and the unknown. The thing in the mind of the artist takes its way and imposes its form as it wakens under his hand. And so with life. — Freya Stark

Tidiness ... makes life easier and more agreeable, does harm to no one and actually saves time and trouble to the person who practices it: there must be an ominous flaw to explain why millions of generations continue to reject it. — Freya Stark

To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure. — Freya Stark

A pen and a notebook and a reasonable amount of discrimination will change a journey from a mere annual into a perennial, its pleasures and pains renewable at will. — Freya Stark

All the feeling which my father could not put into words was in his hand-any dog, child or horse would recognize the kindness of it. — Freya Stark

Once divested of missionary virus, the cult of our gods gives no offence. It would be a peaceful age if this were recognized, and religion, Christian, communist or any other, were to rely on practice and not on conversion for her growth. — Freya Stark

To think to keep things as they are, is to let them move unpredictably, since nothing but death will still the beat of the heart or keep the universe from its perpetual motion. — Freya Stark

Revolution is man's normal activity, and if he is wise he will grade it slowly so that it may be almost imperceptible - otherwise it will jerk in fits and starts and cause discomfort ... — Freya Stark

One has to resign oneself to being a nuisance if one wants to get anything done. — Freya Stark

Life, to be happy at all, must be in its way a sacrament, and it is a failure in religion to divorce it from the holy acts of everyday, of ordinary human existence. — Freya Stark

I have long come to believe that, more than any other destruction, our word-recklessness is endangering the future of us all. — Freya Stark

The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own traveling brotherhood. — Freya Stark

Love, like broken porcelain, should be wept over and buried, for nothing but a miracle will resuscitate it: but who in this world has not for some wild moments thought to recall the irrecoverable with words? — Freya Stark

I can't get over the exciting beauty of New York - the pencil buildings so high and far that the blueness of the sky floats about them; the feeling that one's taxis, and shopping, all go on in the deep canyon-beds of natural erosions rather than in the excrescences of human builders. — Freya Stark

I cannot think a civilization worth having that does not encourage and enable its subjects to spend something, not extorted by governments but freely given to keep wretchedness at least from the streets they walk through day by day. — Freya Stark

It seems to me that the only thing for a pacifist to do is to find a substitute for war: mountains and seafaring are the only ones I know. But it must be something sufficiently serious not to be a game and sufficiently dangerous to exercise those virtues which otherwise get no chance. — Freya Stark

I first noticed how the sound of water is like the talk of human voices, and would sometimes wake in the night and listen, thinking that a crowd of people were coming through the woods. — Freya Stark

Nearly all trouble comes from mis-timing ... — Freya Stark

Constancy, far from being a virtue, seems often to be the besetting sin of the human race, daughter of laziness and self-sufficiency, sister of sleep, the cause of most wars and practically all persecutions. — Freya Stark

Every word calls up far more of a picture than its actual meaning is supposed to do, and the writer has to deal with all these silent associations as well as with the uttered significance. — Freya Stark

Style is something peculiar to one person; it expresses one personality and one only; it cannot be shared. — Freya Stark

The portion we see of human beings is very small: their formats and faces, voices and words ... beyond these, like an immense dark continent, lies all that has made them. — Freya Stark

I want to be one of those people who are always to be found at home, nice restful people whom everybody likes because they give a feeling of permanence to this rushing world. — Freya Stark

I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn't got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don't believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs. — Freya Stark

All our acts have sacramental possibilities. — Freya Stark

I think that the worst unpleasantness of age is not its final fact ... but the tediousness of preparation, the accumulating number of defeats. — Freya Stark

This is excellence - the following of anything for its own sake and with its own integrity ... — Freya Stark

A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood. — Freya Stark

On the other hand, there is a certain advantage in traveling with someone who has a reputation for shooting rather than being shot: as Keram said, in a self-satisfied way, they might kill me, but they would know that, if I was with him, there would be unpleasantness afterwards. — Freya Stark

The past is our treasure. Its works, whether we know them or not, flourish in our lives with whatever strength they had. From it we draw provision for our journey, the collected wisdom whose harvests are all ours to reap and carry with us, though we may never live again in the fields that grew them. — Freya Stark

Perhaps the best function of parenthood is to teach the young creature to love with safety, so that it may be able to venture unafraid when later emotion comes; the thwarting of the instinct to love is the root of all sorrow and not sex only but divinity itself is insulted when it is repressed. To disapprove, to condemn the human soul shrivels under barren righteousness. — Freya Stark

The Persian's mind, like his illuminated manuscripts, does not deal in perspective: two thousand years, if he happens to know anything about them, are as exciting as the day before yesterday ... — Freya Stark

Except in the eyes of a few fanatics (untrustworthy as all lovers) an unmitigated expanse of water is dull even when blue: not in a small boat, where you are part of the winds and currents and tides and are allowed to hold the tiller now and then; but from those decks which the shipping companies with subconscious insight try to make as suburban as possible so that the impact of the monster outside may be lessened, and where the unrecognized boredom is so deep that a wispy smear of smoke on the horizon will queue up a crowd as if for a Valkyrie passing. — Freya Stark

Your real progressives are never fair: they are never sufficiently neutral. — Freya Stark

Who dares to be intellectual in the presence of death? — Freya Stark

I do think we should be provided with a new body about the age of thirty or so when we have learnt to attend to it with consideration. — Freya Stark

You will, if you're wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go on the stream of the unknown and accept whatever comes in the spirit in which the gods may offer it. — Freya Stark

It is better to be passionate than to be tolerant at the expense of one's soul. — Freya Stark

The only thing for a pacifist to do is to find a substitute for war. — Freya Stark

The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised. — Freya Stark

The camel carries on his dreary circular task with his usual slow and pompous step and head poised superciliously, as if it were a ritual affair above the comprehension of the vulgar; and no doubt he comforts himself for the dullness of life by a sense of virtue, like many other formalists beside him. — Freya Stark

On the whole, age comes more gently to those who have some doorway into an abstract world-art, or philosophy, or learning-regions where the years are scarcely noticed and the young and old can meet in a pale truthful light. — Freya Stark

There is generosity in giving, but gentleness in receiving. — Freya Stark

One life is an absurdly small allowance. — Freya Stark

Christmas is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart. — Freya Stark

The camel is an ugly animal, seen from above. Its shoulders slope formless like a sack, its silly little ears and fluff of bleached curls behind them have a respectable, boarding-house look, like some faded neatness that dresses for propriety but never dressed for love. — Freya Stark

If one were given a single window from which to look upon the changing Eastern world, it should face, I think, the road. — Freya Stark

Whoever designed this frigging map was having a laugh. Just around the corner, my arse. — Freya Stark

The greatest of mythologies divided its gods into creators, preservers and destroyers. Tidiness obviously belongs to the second category, which mitigates the terrific impact of the other two. — Freya Stark

There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do. — Freya Stark

The beckoning counts, not the clicking latch behind you — Freya Stark

Freshness trembles beneath the surface of Everyday, a joy perpetual to all who catch its opal lights beneath the dust of habit. — Freya Stark

Manners are like zero in arithmetic. They may not be much in themselves, but they are capable of adding a great deal of value to everything else. — Freya Stark

Every victory of man over man has in itself a taste of defeat ... There is no essential difference between the various human groups, creatures whose bones and brains and members are the same; and every damage we do there is a form of mutilation, as if the fingers of the left hand were to be cut off by the right. — Freya Stark

What a strange revelation of self-esteem it is when people only love those who think and feel as they do - an extension of themselves, in fact! Even Christianity does not cure us, since one cannot feel right without assuming that the rest must be wrong. Personally I would rather feel wrong with everybody else than right all by myself: I like people different, and agree with the man who said that the worst of the human race is the number of duplicates. — Freya Stark

The true fruit of travel is perhaps the feeling of being nearly everywhere at home. — Freya Stark

Fair and unfair are among the most influential words in English and must be delicately used. — Freya Stark

To feel, and think, and learn - learn always: surely that is being alive and young in the real sense — Freya Stark

Accuracy is the basis of style. Words dress our thoughts and should fit; and should fit not only in their utterances, but in their implications, their sequences, and their silences, just as in architecture the empty spaces are as important as those that are filled. — Freya Stark

It is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization. — Freya Stark

The art of advertising - untruthfulness combined with repetition. — Freya Stark

This is one of the charms of the desert, that removing as it does nearly all the accessories of life, we see the thin thread of necessities on which our human existence is suspended ... — Freya Stark

An absolute condition of all successful living, whether for an individual or a nation, is the acceptance of death. — Freya Stark

Few - very few - of our attainments are so profound that they are valid for always; even if they are so, they need adjustment, a straightening here, a loosening there, like an old garment to be fitted to the body ... — Freya Stark