Freya Stark Quotes
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There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.
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every frontier is doomed to produce an opposition beyond it. Nothing short of the universal can build the unfenced peace.
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Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond since it deals with what one is and not what one has.
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Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to dose it rightly is an art like any other.
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To awaken quite alone in a strange town, is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.
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Who dares to be intellectual in the presence of death?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Fair and unfair are among the most influential words in English and must be delicately used.
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If one were given a single window from which to look upon the changing Eastern world, it should face, I think, the road.
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... freshness trembles beneath the surface of Everyday, a joy perpetual to all who catch its opal lights beneath the dust of habit.
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There is generosity in giving, but gentleness in receiving.
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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.
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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.
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... 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.
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The only thing for a pacifist to do is to find a substitute for war.
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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.
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Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.
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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.
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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.
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Christmas, in fact, is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart: like a nursery story, its validity rests on exact repetition, so that it comes around every time as the evocation of one's whole life and particularly of the most distant bits of it in childhood.
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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.
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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.