161 Quotes by Freya Stark

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.

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

advertisement ... has brought our disregard for truth into the open without even a figleaf to cover it.

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.

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.

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.

Nearly all trouble comes from mis-timing...

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

If I were asked to enumerate the pleasures of travel, this would be one of the greatest among them – that so often and so unexpectedly you meet the best in human nature, and seeing it so by surprise and often with a most improbable background, you come, with a sense of pleasant thankfulness, to realize how widely scattered in the world are goodness and courtesy and the love of immaterial things, fair blossoms found in every climate, on every soil.