Freya Stark quotes

" There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do. " # Happiness # Freedom # Power

" Perhaps the best function of parenthood is to teach the young creature to love with safety, so that it may be able to venture unafraid when later emotion comes; 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. To disapprove, to condemn --the human soul shrivels under barren righteousness. " # Parents and Parenting # Love # Sex

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

" 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. " # America # Freedom # Power

" The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. 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. " # Life and Living # Change # Lies and Lying

" 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. " # Sorrow # Debt # Fear

" 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. " # Women # Stupidity # Love

" 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. " # Success # Age and Aging # Philosophers and Philosophy