Top 90 Freya Stark Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Freya Stark

2. “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

3. “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.”

— Freya Stark

4. “Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.”

— Freya Stark

5. “One has to resign oneself to being a nuisance if one wants to get anything done.”

— Freya Stark

6. “Risk is the salt and sugar of life.”

— Freya Stark

7. “It is only the unexpected that ever makes a customs officer think.”

— Freya Stark

8. “Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.”

— Freya Stark

9. “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.”

— Freya Stark

10. “The essence of travel is diffuse. It is never there on the spot as it were, but always beyond: its symbol is the horizon, and its interest always lies over that edge in the unseen.”

— Freya Stark

11. “The beckoning counts, and not the clicking of the latch behind you.”

— Freya Stark

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

— Freya Stark

13. “The most ominous of fallacies – the belief that things can be kept static by inaction.”

— Freya Stark

14. “A part of all art is to make silence speak. The things left out in painting, the note withheld in music, the void in architecture – all are as necessary and as active as the utterance itself.”

— Freya Stark

15. “This is a great moment, when you see, however distant, the goal of your wandering. The thing which has been living in your imagination suddenly become part of the tangible world. It matters not how many ranges, rivers or parching dusty ways may lie between you; it is yours now for ever.”

— Freya Stark

16. “You will, if you’re 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.”

— Freya Stark

17. “The true call of the desert, of the mountains, or the sea, is their silence – free of the networks of dead speech.”

— Freya Stark

18. “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...”

— Freya Stark

19. “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

20. “The art of advertising – untruthfulness combined with repetition.”

— Freya Stark

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

— Freya Stark

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

— Freya Stark

23. “Time is the sea in which men grow, are born, or die.”

— Freya Stark

24. “The world has become too full of many things, an over furnished room.”

— Freya Stark

25. “I first noticed how the sound of water is like the talk of human voices, and would sometimes wake in the night and listen, thinking that a crowd of people were coming through the woods.”

— Freya Stark

26. “In one form or another, conscious or unconscious, we have all become propagandists; integrity alone can keep us truthful.”

— Freya Stark

27. “The camel is an ugly animal, seen from above. Its shoulders slope formless like a sack, its silly little ears and fluff of bleached curls behind them have a respectable, boarding-house look, like some faded neatness that dresses for propriety but never dressed for love.”

— Freya Stark

28. “Good days are to be gathered like grapes, to be trodden and bottled into wine and kept for age to sip at ease beside the fire. If the traveler has vintaged well, he need trouble to wander no longer; the ruby moments glow in his glass at will.”

— Freya Stark

29. “From love one can only escape at the price of life itself; and no lessening of sorrow is worth exile from that stream of all things human and divine.”

— Freya Stark

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

— Freya Stark

31. “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...”

— Freya Stark

32. “There is generosity in giving, but gentleness in receiving.”

— Freya Stark

33. “Love, like broken porcelain, should be wept over and buried, for nothing but a miracle will resuscitate it: but who in this world has not for some wild moments thought to recall the irrecoverable with words?”

— Freya Stark

34. “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.”

— Freya Stark

35. “One life is an absurdly small allowance.”

— Freya Stark

36. “The art of learning fundamental common values is perhaps the greatest gain of travel to those who wish to live at ease among their fellows.”

— Freya Stark

37. “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 pleasant waters for our old age.”

— Freya Stark

38. “The true fruit of travel is perhaps the feeling of being nearly everywhere at home.”

— Freya Stark

39. “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.”

— Freya Stark

40. “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.”

— Freya Stark

41. “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.”

— Freya Stark

42. “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...”

— Freya Stark

43. “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

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

— Freya Stark

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

— Freya Stark

46. “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.”

— Freya Stark

47. “Constancy, far from being a virtue, seems often to be the besetting sin of the human race, daughter of laziness and self-sufficiency, sister of sleep, the cause of most wars and practically all persecutions.”

— Freya Stark

48. “On the whole, age comes more gently to those who have some doorway into an abstract world-art, or philosophy, or learning-regions where the years are scarcely noticed and the young and old can meet in a pale truthful light.”

— Freya Stark

49. “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

50. “Most people, after accomplishing something, use it over and over again like a gramophone record till it cracks, forgetting that the past is just the stuff with which to make more future.”

— Freya Stark