161 Quotes by Freya Stark

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 ...

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

Whatever the advantages of the machine may be - and they are many - the very ease of its use is bound to make away with intimacy - the intercourse of human beings, of animals, or of that which we still think of as the natural world.

... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.

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

Pain and fear and hunger are effects of causes which can be foreseen and known: but sorrow is a debt which someone else makes for us.

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.

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.

We love those people who give with humility, or who accept with ease.