161 Quotes by Freya Stark

Fair and unfair are among the most influential words in English and must be delicately used.

Manners are like zero in arithmetic. They may not be much in themselves, but they are capable of adding a great deal of value to everything else.

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.

The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own traveling brotherhood.

every frontier is doomed to produce an opposition beyond it. Nothing short of the universal can build the unfenced peace.

This is one of the charms of the desert, that removing as it does nearly all the accessories of life, we see the thin thread of necessities on which our human existence is suspended ...

It is not badness, it is the absence of goodness, which, in Art as in Life, is so depressing.

To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure.

The past is our treasure. Its works, whether we know them or not, flourish in our lives with whatever strength they had. From it we draw provision for our journey, the collected wisdom whose harvests are all ours to reap and carry with us, though we may never live again in the fields that grew them.