Freya Stark Quotes
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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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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.
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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.
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The beckoning counts, and not the clicking of the latch behind you.
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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.
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... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.
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Words are the only arteries of thought our poor human body possesses.
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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.
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One life is an absurdly small allowance.
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it is a lean employment of time to brood on what might have happened along some other turning.
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Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.
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Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.
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Your real progressives are never fair: they are never sufficiently neutral.
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Style is something peculiar to one person; it expresses one personality and one only; it cannot be shared.
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The monstrosity of bureaucracy, I thought: always the pint-pot judging the gallon, the scribe's, the door-keeper's world. Always the stupidity of people who feel certain about things they never try to find out. A world that educates people to be ignorant - that is what this world of ours is.
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I have long come to believe that, more than any other destruction, our word-recklessness is endangering the future of us all.
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Risk is the salt and sugar of life.
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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.
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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.
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... I cannot think a civilization worth having that does not encourage and enable its subjects to spend something, not extorted by governments but freely given to keep wretchedness at least from the streets they walk through day by day.
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The past is our treasure. Its works, whether we know them or not, flourish in our lives with whatever strength they had. From it we draw provision for our journey, the collected wisdom whose harvests are all ours to reap and carry with us, though we may never live again in the fields that grew them.
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It is not badness, it is the absence of goodness, which, in Art as in Life, is so depressing.
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To feel, and think, and learn - learn always: surely that is being alive and young in the real sense
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... 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.