Freya Stark Quotes
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The unexpectedness of life, waiting round every corner, catches even wise women unawares (...) To avoid corners altogether is, after all, to refuse to live.
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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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One life is an absurdly small allowance.
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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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it is a lean employment of time to brood on what might have happened along some other turning.
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The beckoning counts, and not the clicking of the latch behind you.
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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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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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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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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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... 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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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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Words are the only arteries of thought our poor human body possesses.
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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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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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Your real progressives are never fair: they are never sufficiently neutral.
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Risk is the salt and sugar of life.
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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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I do like people who have not yet made up their minds about everything, who in fact are still receiving
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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 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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Whatever the advantages of the machine may be - and they are many - the very ease of its use is bound to make away with intimacy - the intercourse of human beings, of animals, or of that which we still think of as the natural world.
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not wholly consciously, but not quite unconsciously, as far as I can remember, I determined to fashion my future as a sculptor his marble, and there was in it the same mixture of foresight and the unknown. The thing in the mind of the artist takes its way and imposes its form as it wakens under his hand. And so with life.