161 Quotes by Freya Stark

One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a healthy private pattern of one’s own and I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism.

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...

I can’t get over the exciting beauty of New York – the pencil buildings so high and far that the blueness of the sky floats about them; the feeling that one’s taxis, and shopping, all go on in the deep canyon-beds of natural erosions rather than in the excrescences of human builders.

This is excellence – the following of anything for its own sake and with its own integrity...

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...

If we are strong, and have faith in life and its richness of surprises, and hold the rudder steadily in our hands. I am sure we will sail into quiet and pleasent waters for our old age.

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

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