I think that the worst unpleasantness of age is not its final fact ... but the tediousness of preparation, the accumulating number of defeats. Freya Stark More Quotes by Freya Stark More Quotes From Freya Stark There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do. Freya Stark happiness inspirational life 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 towns adventure world 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 imagination rivers lying Risk is the salt and sugar of life. Freya Stark salt sugar risk 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 differences healthy trying The true fruit of travel is perhaps the feeling of being nearly everywhere at home. Freya Stark home feelings travel 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 good-day wine fire Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good. Freya Stark tolerance evil may 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 journey history past To feel, and think, and learn - learn always: surely that is being alive and young in the real sense Freya Stark alive real thinking 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 wise travel art The most ominous of fallacies - the belief that things can be kept static by inaction Freya Stark fear-of-failure belief mistake 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 accessories desert doe Christmas... is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart. Freya Stark christmas home heart 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 believe moving thinking 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 blank-mind atmosphere knowing 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 light philosophy art Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature. Freya Stark invincible one-thing curiosity 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 void silence art Every victory of man over man has in itself a taste of defeat.... There is no essential difference between the various human groups, creatures whose bones and brains and members are the same; and every damage we do there is a form of mutilation, as if the fingers of the left hand were to be cut off by the right. Freya Stark cutting winning men
