Quotes from Andrew Lang

And then they lived happily, and we who hear the story are happier still.

Now that reading and writing are universal accomplishments, books are not bought so freely as they were about 1820. . . . [I]n fact, book-buying does not increase in proportion with the power of reading printed matter. People prefer periodical trash, snippets of twaddle. [February 1894, editor's introduction to Dana Estes & Company's The Betrothed, by Sir Walter Scott]

She believes that I love her!" cried the King. "What a fatal mistake! What is to be done to undeceive her?" "You know best," answered the Mermaid, smiling kindly at him. "When people are as much in love with one another as you two are, they don't need advice from anyone else.

much is gained by patience

Indeed it is impossible to set limits to such coincidence, for it would indeed be extraordinary if extraordinary coincidences never occurred.

Of all animals, the cat alone attains to the comtemplative life. He regards the wheel of existence from without, like the Buddha.

My dear Prince, might I beg you to move a little more that way, for your nose casts such a shadow that I really cannot see what I have on my plate

THE RED FAIRY BOOK

You see how self-love keeps us from knowing our own defects of mind and body. Our reason tries in vain to show them to us; we refuse to see them till we find them in the way of our interests.

Nothing tastes better than what one eats by oneself.

But now, since you are set among Knights of heavenly adventures, if you were worsted at that tournament it is no marvel. For the tournament was meant for a sign, and the earthly Knights were they who were clothed in black in token of the sins of which they were not yet purged.

Instead of answering the young man lifted up his robe, and showed the Sultan that, from the waist downwards, he was a block of black marble.

The later years of the Romans, who abandoned Britain in 410, were perturbed by attacks of the Scoti (Scots) from Ireland, and it is to a settlement in Argyll of "Dalriadic" Scots from Ireland about 500 A.D. that our country owes the name of Scotland.

Like his heroes, the men in the Cuchullain sagas fight from light chariots, drawn by two ponies, and we know that so fought the tribes in Scotland encountered by Agricola the Roman General (81-85 A.D.) It is even said in the Irish epics that Cuchullain learned his chariotry in Alba—that is, in our Scotland.

The next day the sorcerer, tied to the tail of a savage mule loaded with nuts, was broken into as many pieces as there were nuts upon the mule's back.[1]

What children do love is ghost stories.

The main fact is that out of these and similar dim transactions arose the claims of Edward I. to the over-lordship of Scotland,—claims that were urged by Queen Elizabeth's minister, Cecil, in 1568, and were boldly denied by Maitland of Lethington. From these misty pretensions came the centuries of war that made the hardy character of the folk of Scotland. {10}

Then this wicked enchantress changed the capital, which was a very populous and flourishing city, into the lake and desert plain you saw. The fish of four colours which are in it are the different races who lived in the town; the four hills are the four islands which give the name to my kingdom.

half man and half marble.

Knox could not fail to see what was so patent: many books of the German reformers may have come in his way; no more was wanted than the preaching of George Wishart in 1543-45, to make him an irreconcilable foe of the doctrine as well as the discipline of his Church.

He loathes what he has left behind him, and it is natural to guess that, in his first years of priesthood, his religious nature slept; that he became a priest and notary merely that he "might eat a morsel of bread"; and that real "conviction" never was his till his studies of Protestant controversialists, and also of St. Augustine and the Bible, and the teaching of Wishart, raised him from a mundane life. 

there are many out-of-the-way things it is as well to know, but one should never boast of them.

The enthusiasm which induced a priest, notary, and teacher like Knox to carry a claymore in defence of a beloved teacher, Wishart, seems more appropriate to a man of about thirty than a man of forty, and, so far, supports the opinion that, in 1545, Knox was only thirty years of age. 

When the young king had finished his sad story he burst once more into tears, and the Sultan was much moved.