Freya Stark > Quotes

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

“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure. You have no idea of what is in store for you, but you will, if you are wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go on the stream of the unknown and accept whatever comes in the spirit in which the gods may offer it. For this reason your customary thoughts, all except the rarest of your friends, even most of your luggage - everything, in fact, which belongs to your everyday life, is merely a hindrance. The tourist travels in his own atmosphere like a snail in his shell and stands, as it were, on his own perambulating doorstep to look at the continents of the world. But if you discard all this, and sally forth with a leisurely and blank mind, there is no knowing what may not happen to you.”
― Freya Stark, Baghdad Sketches

“There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.”
― Freya Stark

“Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.”
― Freya Stark

“One life is an absurdly small allowance.”
― Freya Stark

“Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles.”
― Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels

“I have no reason to go, except that I have never been, and knowledge is better than ignorance. What better reason could there be for travelling?”
― Freya Stark, A Winter in Arabia

“Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond since it deals with what one is and not what one has.”
― Freya Stark

“Christmas is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart.”
― Freya Stark

“Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.”
― Freya Stark

“Surely, of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest.”
― Freya Stark

“Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or a penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles...Modern education ignores the need for solitude: hence a decline in religion, in poetry, in all the deeper affections of the spirit: a disease to be doing something always, as if one could never sit quietly and let the puppet show unroll itself before one: an inability to lose oneself in mystery and wonder while, like a wave lifting us into new seas, the history of the world develops around us.”
― Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels

“There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do”
― Freya Stark

“What a strange revelation of self-esteem it is when people only love those who think and feel as they do - an extension of themselves, in fact! Even Christianity does not cure us, since one cannot feel right without assuming that the rest must be wrong. Personally I would rather feel wrong with everybody else than right all by myself: I like people different, and agree with the man who said that the worst of the human race is the number of duplicates.”
― Freya Stark, Baghdad Sketches

“The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid that one is and no one is surprised. When the police stopped our car at Bedrah and enquired where we were staying, the chauffeur, who did not know, told him to ask the lady.
"That is no good," said the policeman. "She's a woman."
"Yes," said the chauffeur, "but she knows everything. She knows Arabic."
The policeman asked me.
I had not the vaguest idea of where we were staying, and looked at him with the blank idiocy which he thought perfectly natural.”
― Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels

“The beckoning counts, not the clicking latch behind you”
― Freya Stark

“There can be no happiness if the things we believe are different than the things we do.”
― Freya Stark

“The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.”
― Freya Stark, East Is West

“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.”
― Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels

“It is a remarkable fact that the people who do things by hand still find time to add to their work some elaboration of mere beauty which makes it a joy to look on, while our machine-made tools, which could do so at much less cost, are too utilitarian to afford any ornament. It used to give me daily pleasure in Teheran to see the sacks in which refuse is carried off the streets woven with a blue and red decorative pattern: but can one imagine a borough council in Leeds or Birmingham expressing a delicate fancy of this kind? Beauty, according to these, is what one buys for the museum: pots and pans, taps and door-handles, though one has to look at them twenty times a day, have no call to be beautiful. So we impoverish our souls and keep our lovely things for rare occasions, even as our lovely thoughts - wasting the most of life in pondering domestic molehills or the Stock Exchange, among objects as ugly as the less attractive forms of sin.”
― Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels

“If one were given a single window from which to look upon the changing Eastern world, it should face, I think, the road.”
― Freya Stark, East Is West

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

“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.”
― Freya Stark The Valleys of the Assassins

“It is so pleasant to feel that we have succeeded in doing what all the People who Know told us was impossible.”
― Freya Stark, Letters from Syria

“I had to write a decalogue for journeys, eight out of the ten virtues should be moral, and I should put first of all a temper as serene at the end as at the beginning of the day. Then would come the capacity to accept values and to judge by standards other than our own. The rapid judgement of character; and a love of nature which must include human nature also. The power to dissociate oneself from one’s own bodily sensations. A knowledge of the local history and language. A leisurely and uncensorious mind. A tolerable constitution and the capacity to eat and sleep at any moment. And lastly, and especially here, a ready quickness in repartee.”
― Freya Stark, A Winter in Arabia: A Journey Through Yemen

“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.”
― Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins, And Other Persian Travels

“In smaller, more familiar things, memory weaves her strongest enchantments, holding us at her mercy with some trifle, some echo, a tone of voice, a scent of tar and seaweed on the quay. . . . This surely is the meaning of home—a place where every day is multiplied by all the days before it.”
― Freya Stark

“Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle.”
― Freya Stark

“When it is impossible to get exacitude even for the present, it is simply a waste of time to wrangle for it in the past.”
― Freya Stark, A Winter in Arabia

“We live for what is written by our deeds.”
― Freya Stark, Baghdad Sketches