Freya Stark
A pen and a notebook and a reasonable amount of discrimination will change a journey from a mere annual into a perennial, its pleasures and pains renewable at will.Collection: Notebook
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.Collection: Luck
We were not for underestimating magic - a life-conductor like the sap between the tree-stem and the bark. We know that it keeps dullness out of religion and poetry. It is probable that without it we might die.Collection: Tree
If one were given a single window from which to look upon the changing Eastern world, it should face, I think, the road.Collection: Thinking
It is only the unexpected that ever makes a customs officer think.Collection: Thinking
every frontier is doomed to produce an opposition beyond it. Nothing short of the universal can build the unfenced peace.Collection: Peace
I suspect anyone self-satisfied enough to refuse lawful pleasures: we are not sufficiently rich in our separate resources to reject the graces of the universe when offered.Collection: Self
From love one can only escape at the price of life itself; and no lessening of sorrow is worth exile from that stream of all things human and divine.Collection: Sorrow
All greatness in style begins, I imagine, with such respect, deep and passionate enough to produce a humility which will not assert itself at the expense even of inanimate things: out of which submissiveness a desire to serve is born, in disinterested accuracy toward the object, whatever it may be.Collection: Humility
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.Collection: Kindness
On the other hand, there is a certain advantage in traveling with someone who has a reputation for shooting rather than being shot: as Keram said, in a self-satisfied way, they might kill me, but they would know that, if I was with him, there would be unpleasantness afterwards.Collection: Self
Nearly all trouble comes from mis-timing.Collection: Timing
Your real progressives are never fair: they are never sufficiently neutral.Collection: Real
Few - very few - of our attainments are so profound that they are valid for always; even if they are so, they need adjustment, a straightening here, a loosening there, like an old garment to be fitted to the body.Collection: Profound
This is excellence - the following of anything for its own sake and with its own integrity.Collection: Integrity
Whoever designed this frigging map was having a laugh. Just around the corner, my arse.Collection: Laughing
It is not badness, it is the absence of goodness, which, in Art as in Life, is so depressing.Collection: Depressing
I think that the worst unpleasantness of age is not its final fact ... but the tediousness of preparation, the accumulating number of defeats.Collection: Thinking
The language of salesmanship was no doubt born with the first fashions in fig leaves in the garden of Eden. A strange concept has grown around it: if something is to be sold, inaccuracy is not immoral. Hence the art of advertisement - untruthfulness combined with repetition.Collection: Fashion
Words are the only arteries of thought our poor human body possesses.Collection: Body
Fair and unfair are among the most influential words in English and must be delicately used.Collection: Fairness
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.Collection: Art
... I cannot think a civilization worth having that does not encourage and enable its subjects to spend something, not extorted by governments but freely given to keep wretchedness at least from the streets they walk through day by day.Collection: Thinking
The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.Collection: Land
... I want to be one of those people who are always to be found at home, nice restful people whom everybody likes because they give a feeling of permanence to this rushing world.Collection: Nice
The perpetual charm of Arabia is that the traveler finds his level there simply as a human being; the people's directness, deadly to the sentimental or pedantic, likes the less complicated virtues.Collection: People
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.Collection: Believe
Once divested of missionary virus, the cult of our gods gives no offence. It would be a peaceful age if this were recognized, and religion, Christian, communist or any other, were to rely on practice and not on conversion for her growth.Collection: Christian
advertisement ... has brought our disregard for truth into the open without even a figleaf to cover it.Collection: Advertising
Whatever the advantages of the machine may be - and they are many - the very ease of its use is bound to make away with intimacy - the intercourse of human beings, of animals, or of that which we still think of as the natural world.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Art
What I find trying in a country which you do not understand and where you cannot speak, is that you can never be yourself.Collection: Country
it is a lean employment of time to brood on what might have happened along some other turning.Collection: Regret
Christmas, in fact, is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart: like a nursery story, its validity rests on exact repetition, so that it comes around every time as the evocation of one's whole life and particularly of the most distant bits of it in childhood.Collection: Christmas
The only thing for a pacifist to do is to find a substitute for war.Collection: War
There are, I sometimes think, only two sorts of people in this world - the settled and the nomad - and there is a natural antipathy between them, whatever the land to which they may belong.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Inspirational
One life is an absurdly small allowance.Collection: Life Is
Constancy, far from being a virtue, seems often to be the besetting sin of the human race, daughter of laziness and self-sufficiency, sister of sleep, the cause of most wars and practically all persecutions.Collection: Daughter
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 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 traveling brotherhood.Collection: Life
The camel is an ugly animal, seen from above. Its shoulders slope formless like a sack, its silly little ears and fluff of bleached curls behind them have a respectable, boarding-house look, like some faded neatness that dresses for propriety but never dressed for love.Collection: Silly
The tourist travels in his own atmosphere like a snail in his shell and stands, as it were, on his own perambulating doorstep to look at the continents of the world. But if you discard all this, and sally forth with a leisurely and blank mind, there is no knowing what may not happen to you.Collection: Blank Mind
The Persian's mind, like his illuminated manuscripts, does not deal in perspective: two thousand years, if he happens to know anything about them, are as exciting as the day before yesterday.Collection: Years
I first noticed how the sound of water is like the talk of human voices, and would sometimes wake in the night and listen, thinking that a crowd of people were coming through the woods.Collection: Night
The camel carries on his dreary circular task with his usual slow and pompous step and head poised superciliously, as if it were a ritual affair above the comprehension of the vulgar; and no doubt he comforts himself for the dullness of life by a sense of virtue, like many other formalists beside him.Collection: Doubt
I dislike being an anvil for the hammering out of other people's virtues.Collection: People
In one form or another, conscious or unconscious, we have all become propagandists; integrity alone can keep us truthful.Collection: Integrity
not wholly consciously, but not quite unconsciously, as far as I can remember, I determined to fashion my future as a sculptor his marble, and there was in it the same mixture of foresight and the unknown. The thing in the mind of the artist takes its way and imposes its form as it wakens under his hand. And so with life.Collection: Fashion
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.Collection: Dog