Freya Stark Quotes

103 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to do it rightly is an art like any other.

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

Freya Stark
It was not my sins that I regretted at that time; but rather the many things undone — even those indiscretions which one might have committed and had not.

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

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

Freya Stark
I dislike being an anvil for the hammering out of other people's virtues.

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

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

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