Freya Stark
To think to keep things as they are, is to let them move unpredictably, since nothing but death will still the beat of the heart or keep the universe from its perpetual motion.Collection: Moving
... there are few things that can reconcile us fully to our parting with a world of which the longest life can see so little and whose beauties have so extraordinary a variety.Collection: World
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.Collection: Past
One is so apt to think of people's affection as a fixed quantity, instead of a sort of moving so 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.Collection: Moving
The essence of travel is diffuse. It is never there on the spot as it were, but always beyond: its symbol is the horizon, and its interest always lies over that edge in the unseen.Collection: Lying
Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles.Collection: Discipline
Love, like broken porcelain, should be wept over and buried, for nothing but a miracle will resuscitate it: but who in this world has not for some wild moments thought to recall the irrecoverable with words?Collection: Broken
Style is something peculiar to one person; it expresses one personality and one only; it cannot be shared.Collection: Acceptance
The beckoning counts, and not the clicking of the latch behind you.Collection: Travel
There is generosity in giving, but gentleness in receiving.Collection: Generosity
We love those people who give with humility, or who accept with ease.Collection: Humility
The true gardener then brushes over the ground with slow and gentle hand, to liberate a space for breath round some favorites; but he is not thinking about destruction except incidentally. It is only the amateur 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.Collection: Weed
Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond since it deals with what one is and not what one has.Collection: Love Of Learning
One has to resign oneself to being a nuisance if one wants to get anything done.Collection: Luck
I have long come to believe that, more than any other destruction, our word-recklessness is endangering the future of us all.Collection: Believe
The world has become too full of many things, an over furnished room.Collection: Simple
Time is the sea in which men grow, are born, or die.Collection: Men
The monstrosity of bureaucracy, I thought: always the pint-pot judging the gallon, the scribe's, the door-keeper's world. Always the stupidity of people who feel certain about things they never try to find out. A world that educates people to be ignorant - that is what this world of ours is.Collection: Doors
The portion we see of human beings is very small: their formats and faces, voices and words.... beyond these, like an immense dark continent, lies all that has made them.Collection: Lying
I do think we should be provided with a new body about the age of thirty or so when we have learnt to attend to it with consideration.Collection: Thinking
The artist's business is to take sorrow when it comes. The depth and capacity of his reception is the measure of his art; and when he turns his back on his own suffering, he denies the very laws of his being and closes the door on everything that can ever make him great.Collection: Art
The past is our treasure. Its works, whether we know them or not, flourish in our lives with whatever strength they had. From it we draw provision for our journey, the collected wisdom whose harvests are all ours to reap and carry with us, though we may never live again in the fields that grew them.Collection: Past