Freya Stark Quotes

103 Sourced Quotes

Good days are to be gathered like sunshine in grapes, to be trodden and bottled into wine and kept for age to sip at ease beside his fire. If the traveller has vintaged well, he need trouble to wander no longer; the ruby moments glow in his glass at will.

Freya Stark
The art of learning fundamental common values is perhaps the greatest gain of travel to those who wish to live at ease among their fellows.

Freya Stark
Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.

Freya Stark
I feel like a divorced wife once my book is published and has left me, and hate to be brought back into intimate contact!

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

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

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

Freya Stark
This is a monstrous country.... Everything in life or death is provided for you, as long as you are contented to have it exactly like everybody else.... One ought not to make sweeping statements about countries one doesn't know — but a people that prides itself on monotony deserves it.

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
Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.

Freya Stark
The most ominous of fallacies — the belief that things can be kept static by inaction.

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

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
The language of salesmanship was no doubt born with the first fashions in fig leaves in the garden of Eden. A strange concept has grown around it: if something is to be sold, inaccuracy is not immoral. Hence the art of advertisement — untruthfulness combined with repetition.

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

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

Freya Stark