Freya Stark Quotes
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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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Most people, after accomplishing something, use it over and over again like a gramophone record till it cracks, forgetting that the past is just the stuff with which to make more future.
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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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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 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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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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Words are the only arteries of thought our poor human body possesses.
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The beckoning counts, and not the clicking of the latch behind you.
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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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it is a lean employment of time to brood on what might have happened along some other turning.
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One life is an absurdly small allowance.
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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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Risk is the salt and sugar of life.
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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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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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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 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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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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It is not badness, it is the absence of goodness, which, in Art as in Life, is so depressing.
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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.
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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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To feel, and think, and learn - learn always: surely that is being alive and young in the real sense