Joseph Jacobs Quotes

Soils and national characters differ, but fairy tales are the same in plot and incidents, if not in treatment.

In the Land of Ire, the belief in fairies, gnomes, ogres and monsters is all but dead; in the Land of Ind, it still flourishes in all the vigour of animism.

Permanent bonds of culture began to be formed between the extreme East and the extreme West of Europe by intermarriage, by commerce, by the admission of the nobles of Byzantium within the orders of chivalry.

The first glimpse that we have of the notions which the Greeks possessed of the shape and the inhabitants of the earth is afforded by the poems passing under the name of Homer.

Up to 1870, it was equally said of France and of Italy that they possessed no folk-tales. Yet, within fifteen years from that date, over 1000 tales had been collected in each country.

so funny. The sun was shining into part of

mouth," says Jack, as sharp as a needle.

Obscure as still remains the origin of that 'genre' of romance to which the tales before us belong, there is little doubt that their models, if not their originals, were once extant at Constantinople.

The words 'fairy tales' must accordingly be taken to include tales in which occurs something 'fairy,' something extraordinary - fairies, giants, dwarfs, speaking animals.

Children, and sometimes those of larger growth, will not read dialect.

The Celtic folk-tales have been collected while the practice of story-telling is still in full vigour, though there is every sign that its term of life is already numbered.

Nowhere else is there so large and consistent a body of oral tradition about the national and mythical heroes as amongst the Gaels.

The successful men of action are not sufficiently self-observant to know exactly on what their success depends.

So Molly took the ring to the king, and she was married to his youngest son, and she never saw the giant again.

Certainly there is abundant evidence of the early transmission by literary means of a considerable number of drolls and folk-tales from India about the time of the Crusaders.

Generally speaking, it has been my ambition to write as a good old nurse will speak when she tells fairy tales.

Forgiveness is the highest and most difficult of all moral lessons.

One might almost say that the history of geographical discovery, properly so called, begins with Captain Cook, the motive of whose voyages was purely scientific curiosity.

In 1893, Miss M. Roalfe Cox brought together, in a volume of the Folk-Lore Society, no less than 345 variants of 'Cinderella' and kindred stories showing how widespread this particular formula was throughout Europe and how substantially identical the various incidents as reproduced in each particular country.

The fate of the Celt in the British Empire bids fair to resemble that of the Greeks among the Romans.

Fee, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of a Christian man, Be he dead, be he living, with my brand, I'll dash his brains from his brain-pan.

Be bold, be bold, but not too bold,
Lest that your heart's blood should run cold.