Freya Stark Quotes

The beckoning counts, not the clicking latch behind you

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

All our acts have sacramental possibilities.

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

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.

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

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

Time is the sea in which men grow are born or die.

Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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