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 StarkRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
True travel involves openness to experiences rather than rigid plans.
Freya Stark's quote emphasizes the distinction between genuine travel and mere tourism. She suggests that real travel comes from embracing the unique offerings of each place rather than imposing one's own expectations and patterns onto the experience. This openness allows for a deeper connection with the surroundings and moments that may otherwise be lost in the desire for familiarity and control.
Themes
TravelTourismExperienceOpennessExploration
In practice
Example use cases
In a travel blog reflecting on personal journeys, this quote could provide insight into embracing new cultures.
More from Freya Stark
All quotes βPerhaps 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 StarkRead
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 StarkRead
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 StarkRead
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 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 traveling brotherhood.
Freya StarkRead
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 StarkRead
Similar quotes
As a traveler, I've often found that the more a culture differs from my own, the more I am struck by its essential humanity.
Rick StevesRead
When you #β travel , you experience, in a very practical way, the act of #β rebirth .
Paulo CoelhoRead
There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.
Ernest HemingwayRead
Of travel I've had my share, man, I've been everywhere.
Johnny CashRead
Traveling makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe.
Bill BrysonRead
It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [...] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were French, it's not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals.
David SedarisRead