Freya Stark Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a healthy private pattern of one's own and I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism.

You will, if you're wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go on the stream of the unknown and accept whatever comes in the spirit in which the gods may offer it.

Risk is the salt and sugar of life.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

The art of advertising - untruthfulness combined with repetition.

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.

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.

All our acts have sacramental possibilities.

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.

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.

On the whole, age comes more gently to those who have some doorway into an abstract world-art, or philosophy, or learning-regions where the years are scarcely noticed and the young and old can meet in a pale truthful light.