Freya Stark Quotes (20 Quotes)

The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static and its value and its weakness lie in being so but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.

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 pleasent waters for our old age.

One is so apt to think of people's affection as a fixed quantity, instead of a sort of moving se with the tide always going out or coming in but still fundamentally there and I believe this difficulty in making allowance for the tide is the reason for half the broken friendships.

I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn't got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don't believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs.

Christmas... is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart.

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.

Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond, since it deals with what one is and not what one has.

Perhaps the best function of parenthood is to teach the young creature to love with safety, so that it may be able to venture unafraid when later emotion comes 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. To disapprove, to condemn the human soul shrivels under barren righteousness.

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.

On the whole, age comes more gently to those who have some doorway into an abstract world-art, or philosophy, or learning-regions where the years are scarcely noticed and the young and old can meet in a pale truthful light.

To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.

It is only the amateur gardener like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices with a sadistic pleasure in weeds that are big and bad enough to pull, and at last, almost forgetting the flowers altogether, turns into a Reformer.

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.

There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.

Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle.

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.

Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.

The most ominous of fallacies - the belief that things can be kept static by inaction.

This is a great moment, when you see, however distant, the goal of your wandering. The thing which has been living in your imagination suddenly become part of the tangible world. It matters not how many ranges, rivers or parching dusty ways may lie between you it is yours now for ever.

Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to dose it rightly is an art like any other.