Freya Stark
There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.Collection: Happiness
Christmas... is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart.Collection: Christmas
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.Collection: Age
Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.Collection: Nature
To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.Collection: Alone
Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle.
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.
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.
Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to dose it rightly is an art like any other.
To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure.Collection: Adventure
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.Collection: Good Day
To feel, and think, and learn - learn always: surely that is being alive and young in the real senseCollection: Real
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Lying
One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a healthy private pattern of one's own and I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism.Collection: Differences
The true fruit of travel is perhaps the feeling of being nearly everywhere at home.Collection: Travel
I do like people who have not yet made up their minds about everything, who in fact are still receivingCollection: People
Risk is the salt and sugar of life.Collection: Risk
You will, if you're wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go on the stream of the unknown and accept whatever comes in the spirit in which the gods may offer it.Collection: Wise
Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.Collection: Evil
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.Collection: Zero
The most ominous of fallacies - the belief that things can be kept static by inactionCollection: Mistake
It is better to be passionate than to be tolerant at the expense of one's soul.Collection: Passion
All our acts have sacramental possibilities.Collection: Possibility
The true call of the desert, of the mountains, or the sea, is their silence - free of the networks of dead speech.Collection: Travel
The unexpectedness of life, waiting round every corner, catches even wise women unawares (...) To avoid corners altogether is, after all, to refuse to live.Collection: Wise
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.Collection: Art
Tidiness ... makes life easier and more agreeable, does harm to no one and actually saves time and trouble to the person who practices it: there must be an ominous flaw to explain why millions of generations continue to reject it.Collection: Order
The art of advertising - untruthfulness combined with repetition.Collection: Art
An absolute condition of all successful living, whether for an individual or a nation, is the acceptance of death.Collection: Death
This is one of the charms of the desert, that removing as it does nearly all the accessories of life, we see the thin thread of necessities on which our human existence is suspended.Collection: Doe
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.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Art
... except in the eyes of a few fanatics (untrustworthy as all lovers) an unmitigated expanse of water is dull even when blue: not in a small boat, where you are part of the winds and currents and tides and are allowed to hold the tiller now and then; but from those decks which the shipping companies with subconscious insight try to make as suburban as possible so that the impact of the monster outside may be lessened, and where the unrecognized boredom is so deep that a wispy smear of smoke on the horizon will queue up a crowd as if for a Valkyrie passing.Collection: Eye
Generalizations, one is told, are dangerous. So is life, for that matter, and it is built up on generalization - from the earliest effort of the adventurer who dared to eat a second berry because the first had not killed him.Collection: Effort
Accuracy is the basis of style. Words dress our thoughts and should fit; and should fit not only in their utterances, but in their implications, their sequences, and their silences, just as in architecture the empty spaces are as important as those that are filled.Collection: Space
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.Collection: Association
... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.Collection: Civilization
monotony is not to be worshipped as a virtue; nor the marriage bed treated as a coffin for security rather than a couch from which to rise refreshed.Collection: Boredom
... 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.Collection: Sex
The greatest of mythologies divided its gods into creators, preservers and destroyers. Tidiness obviously belongs to the second category, which mitigates the terrific impact of the other two.Collection: Impact
Who dares to be intellectual in the presence of death?Collection: Intellectual
Like a human being, the mountain is a composite creature, only to be known after many a view from many a different point, and repaying this loving study, if it is anything of a mountain at all, by a gradual revelation of personality, an increase of significance.Collection: Views
I feel like a divorced wife once my book is published and has left me, and hate to be brought back into intimate contact!Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Peace
I do dislike people with Moral Aims. Everyone asks me why I learn Arabic, and when I say I just like it, they looked shocked and incredulous.Collection: People
Life, to be happy at all, must be in its way a sacrament, and it is a failure in religion to divorce it from the holy acts of everyday, of ordinary human existence.Collection: Divorce
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.Collection: New York
Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.Collection: Coins
Revolution is man's normal activity, and if he is wise he will grade it slowly so that it may be almost imperceptible - otherwise it will jerk in fits and starts and cause discomfort.Collection: Change