Freya Stark Quotes

Risk is the salt and sugar of life.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

All our acts have sacramental possibilities.

Who dares to be intellectual in the presence of death?

The beckoning counts, not the clicking latch behind you

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

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

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

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

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.

Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond since it deals with what one is and not what one has.

The art of advertising - untruthfulness combined with repetition.

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

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.

Nearly all trouble comes from mis-timing ...

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

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

Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.

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

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

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

Pain and fear and hunger are effects of causes which can be foreseen and known: but sorrow is a debt which someone else makes for us.

The most ominous of fallacies - the belief that things can be kept static by inaction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surely, of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest.

There is generosity in giving, but gentleness in receiving.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

One life is an absurdly small allowance.

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

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

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

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

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?

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