Freya Stark Quotes
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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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the main necessity on both sides of a revolution is kindness, which makes possible the most surprising things. To treat one's neighbor as oneself is the fundamental maxim for revolution.
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The portion we see of human beings is very small: their formats and faces, voices and words.... beyond these, like an immense dark continent, lies all that has made them.
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In one form or another, conscious or unconscious, we have all become propagandists; integrity alone can keep us truthful.
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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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I can't get over the exciting beauty of New York - the pencil buildings so high and far that the blueness of the sky floats about them; the feeling that one's taxis, and shopping, all go on in the deep canyon-beds of natural erosions rather than in the excrescences of human builders.
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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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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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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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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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every word calls up far more of a picture than its actual meaning is supposed to do, and the writer has to deal with all these silent associations as well as with the uttered significance.
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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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We love those people who give with humility, or who accept with ease.
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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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This is excellence - the following of anything for its own sake and with its own integrity.
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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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Every victory of man over man has in itself a taste of defeat.... There is no essential difference between the various human groups, creatures whose bones and brains and members are the same; and every damage we do there is a form of mutilation, as if the fingers of the left hand were to be cut off by the right.
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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 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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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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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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An absolute condition of all successful living, whether for an individual or a nation, is the acceptance of death.
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Nearly all trouble comes from mis-timing.
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The artist's business is to take sorrow when it comes. The depth and capacity of his reception is the measure of his art; and when he turns his back on his own suffering, he denies the very laws of his being and closes the door on everything that can ever make him great.