Freya Stark Quotes
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If we are strong, and have faith in life and its richness of surprises, and hold the rudder steadily in our hands. I am sure we will sail into quiet and pleasant waters for our old age.
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To think to keep things as they are, is to let them move unpredictably, since nothing but death will still the beat of the heart or keep the universe from its perpetual motion.
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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.
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words are but drops pressed out of the lives of those who lived them.
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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.
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The true fruit of travel is perhaps the feeling of being nearly everywhere at home.
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I dislike being an anvil for the hammering out of other people's virtues.
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All the feeling which my father could not put into words was in his hand-any dog, child or horse would recognize the kindness of it.
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Manners are like zero in arithmetic. They may not be much in themselves, but they are capable of adding a great deal of value to everything else.
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I do think we should be provided with a new body about the age of thirty or so when we have learnt to attend to it with consideration.
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Things good in themselves ... perfectly valid in the integrity of their origins, become fetters if they cannot alter.
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advertisement ... has brought our disregard for truth into the open without even a figleaf to cover it.
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Pain and fear and hunger are effects of causes which can be foreseen and known: but sorrow is a debt which someone else makes for us.
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Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles.
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This is excellence - the following of anything for its own sake and with its own integrity.
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Love, like broken porcelain, should be wept over and buried, for nothing but a miracle will resuscitate it: but who in this world has not for some wild moments thought to recall the irrecoverable with words?
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The camel is an ugly animal, seen from above. Its shoulders slope formless like a sack, its silly little ears and fluff of bleached curls behind them have a respectable, boarding-house look, like some faded neatness that dresses for propriety but never dressed for love.
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The art of learning fundamental common values is perhaps the greatest gain of travel to those who wish to live at ease among their fellows.
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We love those people who give with humility, or who accept with ease.
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The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.
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A part of all art is to make silence speak. The things left out in painting, the note withheld in music, the void in architecture - all are as necessary and as active as the utterance itself.
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An absolute condition of all successful living, whether for an individual or a nation, is the acceptance of death.
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The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.
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Nearly all trouble comes from mis-timing.