Freya Stark Quotes

103 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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
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
Advertisement... has brought our disregard for truth into the open without even a fig leaf to cover it.

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
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
Eight of them [camels] came padding past our door at dusk as we came up the steps; rolling along like waves in the half light. They have a very soft footfall, as if they were treading on dust.

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

Freya Stark
It is not badness, it is the absence of goodness, which, in Art as in Life, is so depressing.

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

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

Freya Stark
The tourist travels in his own atmosphere like a snail in his shell and stands, as it were, on his own perambulating doorstep to look at the continents of the world. But if you discard all this, and sally forth with a leisurely and blank mind, there is no knowing what may not happen to you.

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

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

Freya Stark
Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.

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
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
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
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
There are few things that can reconcile us fully to our parting with a world of which the longest life can see so little and whose beauties have so extraordinary a variety.

Freya Stark
I do dislike people with Moral Aims. Everyone asks me why I learn Arabic, and when I say I just like it, they looked shocked and incredulous.

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

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