Quotes from Freya Stark

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

Surely, of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest.

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.

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

The beckoning counts, not the clicking latch behind you

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.

The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

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

If one were given a single window from which to look upon the changing Eastern world, it should face, I think, the road.

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.

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

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

As boas maneiras são como o zero a aritmética: por si sós, elas pouco ou nada representam, mas são capazes de acrescentar muito ao valor das outras coisas.

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.

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

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

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

it is a lean employment of time to brood on what might have happened along some other turning.

To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.

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.

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

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.

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.

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