Freya Stark Quotes - Page 5

Once divested of missionary virus, the cult of our gods gives no offence. It would be a peaceful age if this were recognized, and religion, Christian, communist or any other, were to rely on practice and not on conversion for her growth.

... except in the eyes of a few fanatics (untrustworthy as all lovers) an unmitigated expanse of water is dull even when blue: not in a small boat, where you are part of the winds and currents and tides and are allowed to hold the tiller now and then; but from those decks which the shipping companies with subconscious insight try to make as suburban as possible so that the impact of the monster outside may be lessened, and where the unrecognized boredom is so deep that a wispy smear of smoke on the horizon will queue up a crowd as if for a Valkyrie passing.

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.

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.

every word calls up far more of a picture than its actual meaning is supposed to do, and the writer has to deal with all these silent associations as well as with the uttered significance.

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

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.

... 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.

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.

Like a human being, the mountain is a composite creature, only to be known after many a view from many a different point, and repaying this loving study, if it is anything of a mountain at all, by a gradual revelation of personality, an increase of significance.

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

I can't get over the exciting beauty of New York - the pencil buildings so high and far that the blueness of the sky floats about them; the feeling that one's taxis, and shopping, all go on in the deep canyon-beds of natural erosions rather than in the excrescences of human builders.

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.

Life, to be happy at all, must be in its way a sacrament, and it is a failure in religion to divorce it from the holy acts of everyday, of ordinary human existence.

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

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.

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.

youth looks at its world and age looks through it; youth must get busy on problems whose outlines stand single and strenuous before it, while age can, with luck, achieve a cosmic private harmony unsuited for action as a rule.

Who dares to be intellectual in the presence of death?

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

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.

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

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