Top 90 Freya Stark Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Style is something peculiar to one person; it expresses one personality and one only; it cannot be shared.”

— Freya Stark

52. “Life, to be happy at all, must be in its way a sacrament, and it is a failure in religion to divorce it from the holy acts of everyday, of ordinary human existence.”

— Freya Stark

53. “I suspect anyone self-satisfied enough to refuse lawful pleasures: we are not sufficiently rich in our separate resources to reject the graces of the universe when offered...”

— Freya Stark

54. “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

55. “Nearly all trouble comes from mis-timing...”

— Freya Stark

56. “An absolute condition of all successful living, whether for an individual or a nation, is the acceptance of death.”

— Freya Stark

57. “All greatness in style begins, I imagine, with such respect, deep and passionate enough to produce a humility which will not assert itself at the expense even of inanimate things: out of which submissiveness a desire to serve is born, in disinterested accuracy toward the object, whatever it may be.”

— Freya Stark

58. “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.”

— Freya Stark

59. “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...”

— Freya Stark

60. “The monstrosity of bureaucracy, I thought: always the pint-pot judging the gallon, the scribe’s, the door-keeper’s world. Always the stupidity of people who feel certain about things they never try to find out. A world that educates people to be ignorant – that is what this world of ours is...”

— Freya Stark

61. “To think to keep things as they are, is to let them move unpredictably, since nothing but death will still the beat of the heart or keep the universe from its perpetual motion.”

— Freya Stark

62. “What I find trying in a country which you do not understand and where you cannot speak, is that you can never be yourself.”

— Freya Stark

63. “Accuracy is the basis of style. Words dress our thoughts and should fit; and should fit not only in their utterances, but in their implications, their sequences, and their silences, just as in architecture the empty spaces are as important as those that are filled.”

— Freya Stark

64. “All the feeling which my father could not put into words was in his hand-any dog, child or horse would recognize the kindness of it.”

— Freya Stark

65. “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.”

— Freya Stark

66. “The language of salesmanship was no doubt born with the first fashions in fig leaves in the garden of Eden. A strange concept has grown around it: if something is to be sold, inaccuracy is not immoral. Hence the art of advertisement – untruthfulness combined with repetition.”

— Freya Stark

67. “The greatest of mythologies divided its gods into creators, preservers and destroyers. Tidiness obviously belongs to the second category, which mitigates the terrific impact of the other two.”

— Freya Stark

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

— Freya Stark

69. “We were not for underestimating magic – a life-conductor like the sap between the tree-stem and the bark. We know that it keeps dullness out of religion and poetry. It is probable that without it we might die.”

— Freya Stark

70. “It seems to me that the only thing for a pacifist to do is to find a substitute for war: mountains and seafaring are the only ones I know. But it must be something sufficiently serious not to be a game and sufficiently dangerous to exercise those virtues which otherwise get no chance.”

— Freya Stark

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

— Freya Stark

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

— Freya Stark

73. “Your real progressives are never fair: they are never sufficiently neutral.”

— Freya Stark

74. “The only thing for a pacifist to do is to find a substitute for war.”

— Freya Stark

75. “I dislike being an anvil for the hammering out of other people’s virtues.”

— Freya Stark

76. “I do dislike people with Moral Aims. Everyone asks me why I learn Arabic, and when I say I just like it, they looked shocked and incredulous.”

— Freya Stark

77. “The artist’s business is to take sorrow when it comes. The depth and capacity of his reception is the measure of his art; and when he turns his back on his own suffering, he denies the very laws of his being and closes the door on everything that can ever make him great.”

— Freya Stark

78. “I do like people who have not yet made up their minds about everything, who in fact are still receiving.”

— Freya Stark

79. “Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.”

— Freya Stark

80. “I do think we should be provided with a new body about the age of thirty or so when we have learnt to attend to it with consideration.”

— Freya Stark

81. “On the other hand, there is a certain advantage in traveling with someone who has a reputation for shooting rather than being shot: as Keram said, in a self-satisfied way, they might kill me, but they would know that, if I was with him, there would be unpleasantness afterwards.”

— Freya Stark

82. “A pen and a notebook and a reasonable amount of discrimination will change a journey from a mere annual into a perennial, its pleasures and pains renewable at will.”

— Freya Stark

83. “I feel like a divorced wife once my book is published and has left me, and hate to be brought back into intimate contact!”

— Freya Stark

84. “All our acts have sacramental possibilities.”

— Freya Stark

85. “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 travelling brotherhood.”

— Freya Stark

86. “It is better to be passionate than to be tolerant at the expense of one’s soul.”

— Freya Stark

87. “I have long come to believe that, more than any other destruction, our word-recklessness is endangering the future of us all.”

— Freya Stark

88. “It is so pleasant to feel that we have succeeded in doing what all the People who Know told us was impossible.”

— Freya Stark

89. “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

90. “Few – very few – of our attainments are so profound that they are valid for always; even if they are so, they need adjustment, a straightening here, a loosening there, like an old garment to be fitted to the body...”

— Freya Stark

91. “Who dares to be intellectual in the presence of death?”

— Freya Stark