161 Quotes by Freya Stark

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...

To feel, and think, and learn – learn always: surely that is being alive and young in the real sense.

I dislike being an anvil for the hammering out of other people’s virtues.

Christmas is not an external event at all, but a piece of one’s home that one carries in one’s heart.

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...

I do like people who have not yet made up their minds about everything, who in fact are still receiving.

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.

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.

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...