Freya Stark Quotes

103 Sourced Quotes

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
She had a genius for forgetting her own mistakes as well as other people's, which is in its way a form of generosity.

Freya Stark
The unexpectedness of life, waiting round every corner, catches even wise women unawares (...) To avoid corners altogether is, after all, to refuse to live.

Freya Stark
One is apt to think of people's affection as a fixed quantity, instead of a sort of moving sea with tide always going out or coming in but still fundamentally there.

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

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 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
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
Whatever the advantages of the machine may be — and they are many — the very ease of its use is bound to make away with intimacy — the intercourse of human beings, of animals, or of that which we still think of as the natural world.

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

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
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
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