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

We love those people who give with humility, or who accept with ease. — Freya Stark

Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond since it deals with what one is and not what one has. — Freya Stark

From love one can only escape at the price of life itself; and no lessening of sorrow is worth exile from that stream of all things human and divine. — Freya Stark

Love, like broken porcelain, should be wept over and buried, for nothing but a miracle will resuscitate it: but who in this world has not for some wild moments thought to recall the irrecoverable with words? — Freya Stark

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

Constancy, far from being a virtue, seems often to be the besetting sin of the human race, daughter of laziness and self–sufficiency, sister of sleep, the cause of most wars and practically all persecutions. — Freya Stark

Words are the only arteries of thought our poor human body possesses. — Freya Stark

I first noticed how the sound of water is like the talk of human voices, and would sometimes wake in the night and listen, thinking that a crowd of people were coming through the woods. — Freya Stark

The portion we see of human beings is very small: their formats and faces, voices and words…. beyond these, like an immense dark continent, lies all that has made them. — Freya Stark

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

Surely, of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest. — Freya Stark

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

The main necessity on both sides of a revolution is kindness, which makes possible The most surprising things. To treat one’s neighbor as oneself is The fundamental maxim for revolution. — Freya Stark

An absolute condition of all successful living, whether for an individual or a nation, is the acceptance of death. — Freya Stark

Words are but drops pressed out of the lives of those who lived them. — Freya Stark

The unexpectedness of life, waiting round every corner, catches even wise women unawares (…) To avoid corners altogether is, after all, to refuse to live. — Freya Stark

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

Your real progressives are never fair: they are never sufficiently neutral. — Freya Stark

All our acts have sacramental possibilities. — Freya Stark

The only thing for a pacifist to do is to find a substitute for war. — Freya Stark

Risk is the salt and sugar of life. — Freya Stark

Things good in themselves … perfectly valid in the integrity of their origins, become fetters if they cannot alter. — Freya Stark

This is excellence–the following of anything for its own sake and with its own integrity. — Freya Stark

It is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization. — Freya Stark

Most people, after accomplishing something, use it over and over again like a gramophone record till it cracks, forgetting that the past is just the stuff with which to make more future. — Freya Stark

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

Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good. — Freya Stark

Fair and unfair are among the most influential words in English and must be delicately used. — Freya Stark

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

There are few things that can reconcile us fully to our parting with a world of which the longest life can see so little and whose beauties have so extraordinary a variety. — Freya Stark

In one form or another, conscious or unconscious, we have all become propagandists; integrity alone can keep us truthful. — Freya Stark

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

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

It is better to be passionate than to be tolerant at the expense of one’s soul. — Freya Stark

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

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

One life is an absurdly small allowance. — Freya Stark

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

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

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