Freya Stark is nothing short of a travel icon.
She was a British writer who quite single-handedly blazed the trail for solo women travelers.
Often intermingling pieces on local culture, history and her own witty commentary, she both entertained and inspired generations of travelers to see and explore the world on their own.
Here are some of her greatest inspirational travel quotes!
"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."
"Curiosity is the one thing invincible in nature."
"There are, I sometimes think, only two sorts of people in this world - the settled and the nomad - and there is a natural antipathy between them, whatever the land to which they may belong."
"The beckoning counts, not the clicking latch behind you."
"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."
"Surely, of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest."
"I have no reason to go, except that I have never been, and knowledge is better than ignorance. What better reason could there be for traveling?"
"If I were asked to enumerate the pleasures of travel, this would be one of the greatest among them - that so often and so unexpectedly you meet the best in human nature, and seeing it so by surprise and often with a most improbable background, you come, with a sense of pleasant thankfulness, to realize how widely scattered in the world are goodness and courtesy and the love of immaterial things, fair blossoms found in every climate, on every soil."
"There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do."
"Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond, since it deals with what one is and not what one has."
"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."
"To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure. You have no idea of what is in store for you, but you will, if you are 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."
"Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes."
"To feel, and think, and learn - learn always: surely that is being alive and young in the real sense."
"The true fruit of travel is perhaps the feeling of being nearly everywhere at home."
"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."
