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
The unexpectedness of life, waiting round every corner, catches even wise women unawares (...) To avoid corners altogether is, after all, to refuse to live.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Life is full of surprises, and avoiding risks means missing out on experiences.
Freya Stark's quote conveys the idea that life is inherently unpredictable and filled with unexpected events that can catch even the most experienced individuals off guard. Attempting to steer clear of all uncertainties and risks is ultimately a denial of the vibrant, rich experiences that come with truly living; facing challenges and surprises is an essential part of the human experience.
Themes
LifeSurpriseRiskExperienceLiving
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared during a motivational speech about embracing life's uncertainties.
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 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
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 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
Extremes are for us as though they were not, and we are not within their notice. They escape us, or we them. This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance... This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.
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The wealth gathered by Jamsetji Tata and his sons in half a century of industrial pioneering formed but a minute fraction of the amount by which they enriched the nation. The whole of that wealth is held in trust for the people and used exclusively for their benefit. The cycle is thus complete; what came from the people has gone back to the people many times over.
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All discourse of which others cannot partake is not only an irksome usurpation of the time devoted to pleasure and entertainment, but, what never fails to excite resentment, an insolent assertion of superiority, and a triumph over less enlightened understandings. The pedant is, therefore, not only heard with weariness but malignity; and those who conceive themselves insulted by his knowledge never fail to tell with acrimony how injudiciously it was exerted.
Samuel JohnsonRead
When religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.
Abraham Joshua HeschelRead
And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.
William ShakespeareRead
I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that does not have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular.
E. B. WhiteRead