Freya Stark

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

— Freya Stark

The art of learning fundamental common values is perhaps the greatest gain of travel to those who wish to live at ease…

— Freya Stark

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

— Freya Stark

The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

— Freya Stark

All the feeling which my father could not put into words was in his hand-any dog, child or horse would recognize the…

— Freya Stark

I do think we should be provided with a new body about the age of thirty or so when we have learnt…

— Freya Stark

Your real progressives are never fair: they are never sufficiently neutral.

— Freya Stark

The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one…

— Freya Stark

We were not for underestimating magic - a life-conductor like the sap between the tree-stem and the bark. We know that it…

— Freya Stark

Tidiness ... makes life easier and more agreeable, does harm to no one and actually saves time and trouble to the person…

— Freya Stark

The Persian's mind, like his illuminated manuscripts, does not deal in perspective: two thousand years, if he happens to know anything about…

— Freya Stark

The language of salesmanship was no doubt born with the first fashions in fig leaves in the garden of Eden. A strange…

— Freya Stark

Good days are to be gathered like grapes, to be trodden and bottled into wine and kept for age to sip at…

— Freya Stark

A part of all art is to make silence speak. The things left out in painting, the note withheld in music, the…

— Freya Stark

Whatever the advantages of the machine may be - and they are many - the very ease of its use is bound…

— Freya Stark

Revolution is man's normal activity, and if he is wise he will grade it slowly so that it may be almost imperceptible…

— Freya Stark

All greatness in style begins, I imagine, with such respect, deep and passionate enough to produce a humility which will not assert…

— Freya Stark

“What a strange revelation of self-esteem it is when people only love those who think and feel as they do - an…

— Freya Stark

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

— Freya Stark

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

— Freya Stark

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

— Freya Stark

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

— Freya Stark

I do like people who have not yet made up their minds about everything, who in fact are still receiving

— Freya Stark

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

— Freya Stark

Style is something peculiar to one person; it expresses one personality and one only; it cannot be shared.

— Freya Stark

it is a lean employment of time to brood on what might have happened along some other turning.

— Freya Stark

Whoever designed this frigging map was having a laugh. Just around the corner, my arse.

— Freya Stark

I do dislike people with Moral Aims. Everyone asks me why I learn Arabic, and when I say I just like it,…

— Freya Stark

I first noticed how the sound of water is like the talk of human voices, and would sometimes wake in the night…

— Freya Stark

The camel is an ugly animal, seen from above. Its shoulders slope formless like a sack, its silly little ears and fluff…

— Freya Stark

The perpetual charm of Arabia is that the traveler finds his level there simply as a human being; the people's directness, deadly…

— Freya Stark

This is one of the charms of the desert, that removing as it does nearly all the accessories of life, we see…

— Freya Stark

From love one can only escape at the price of life itself; and no lessening of sorrow is worth exile from that…

— Freya Stark

monotony is not to be worshipped as a virtue; nor the marriage bed treated as a coffin for security rather than a…

— Freya Stark

There are, I sometimes think, only two sorts of people in this world - the settled and the nomad - and there…

— Freya Stark

Constancy, far from being a virtue, seems often to be the besetting sin of the human race, daughter of laziness and self-sufficiency,…

— Freya Stark

Generalizations, one is told, are dangerous. So is life, for that matter, and it is built up on generalization - from the…

— Freya Stark

every word calls up far more of a picture than its actual meaning is supposed to do, and the writer has to…

— Freya Stark

I think that the worst unpleasantness of age is not its final fact ... but the tediousness of preparation, the accumulating number…

— Freya Stark

Manners are like zero in arithmetic. They may not be much in themselves, but they are capable of adding a great deal…

— Freya Stark