Quote

The true call of the desert, of the mountains, or the sea, is their silence - free of the networks of dead speech.

Freya Stark

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Freya Stark
Age: 100 †
Born: 1893
Born: January 31
Died: 1993
Died: May 9
Author
Essayist
Explorer
Mountaineer
Photographer
Travel Writer
Traveler
Writer
Paris
France
Dame Freya Madeline Stark
True
Sea
Mountain
Travel
Speech
Silence
Dead
Networks
Call
Mountains
Free
Desert

More quotes by Freya Stark

Image
Style is something peculiar to one person it expresses one personality and one only it cannot be shared.
Freya Stark
Image
... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.
Freya Stark
Image
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
Image
... the thwarting of the instinct to love is the root of all sorrow and not sex only but divinity itself is insulted when it is repressed.
Freya Stark
Image
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
Image
Once divested of missionary virus, the cult of our gods gives no offence. It would be a peaceful age if this were recognized, and religion, Christian, communist or any other, were to rely on practice and not on conversion for her growth.
Freya Stark
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
... freshness trembles beneath the surface of Everyday, a joy perpetual to all who catch its opal lights beneath the dust of habit.
Freya Stark
Image
I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn't got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don't believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs.
Freya Stark
Image
The true fruit of travel is perhaps the feeling of being nearly everywhere at home.
Freya Stark
Image
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
Image
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
Image
monotony is not to be worshipped as a virtue nor the marriage bed treated as a coffin for security rather than a couch from which to rise refreshed.
Freya Stark
Image
All our acts have sacramental possibilities.
Freya Stark
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I dislike being an anvil for the hammering out of other people's virtues.
Freya Stark
Image
The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.
Freya Stark