Quotes by Freya Stark

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Christmas... is not an eternal event at all, but a piece of ones home that one carries in ones heart...”

“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.”

“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 peoples 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.”

Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.

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

Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.

The beckoning counts, not the clicking latch behind you

What a strange revelation of self-esteem it is when people only love those who think and feel as they do - an extension of themselves, in fact! Even Christianity does not cure us, since one cannot feel right without assuming that the rest must be wrong. Personally I would rather feel wrong with everybody else than right all by myself: I like people different, and agree with the man who said that the worst of the human race is the number of duplicates.

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

Things good in themselves ... perfectly valid in the integrity of their origins become fetters if they cannot alter.