19 Quotes & Sayings By Freya Stark

Freya Stark was born in London. She trained at the Slade School of Fine Art and then worked as a portrait painter for six years, specialising in figure painting. During this time she was a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy and won a number of medals. Her first published book, The Art of Freya Stark, was a collection of her paintings, which were reproduced on velveteen in a limited edition Read more

Her paintings have been exhibited throughout the world and have been held in many private collections. Freya married Henry Aylwin Stark, son of Sir Edward Aylwin Stark, 1st Baronet in 1914. In 1920 they set up their own portrait studio on Baker Street.

They had four children: Evelyn (1917), Anthony (1920), Henry (1923) and Michael (1928).

1
Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature. Freya Stark
2
Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond since it deals with what one is and not what one has. Freya Stark
3
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. Freya Stark
4
The beckoning counts, not the clicking latch behind you Freya Stark
5
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. Freya Stark
6
The most ominous of fallacies: the belief that things can be kept static by inaction. Freya Stark
7
Things good in themselves ... perfectly valid in the integrity of their origins become fetters if they cannot alter. Freya Stark
8
All our acts have sacramental possibilities. Freya Stark
9
Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life and to do it rightly is an art like any other. Freya Stark
10
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. Freya Stark
11
There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do. Freya Stark
12
Time is the sea in which men grow are born or die. Freya Stark
13
Style is something peculiar to one person it expresses one personality and one only it cannot be shared. Freya Stark
14
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
15
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. Freya Stark
16
Christmas... is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart. Freya Stark
17
Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle. Freya Stark
18
To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world. Freya Stark