24 Quotes by Joseph Jacobs

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

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

Well, come supper-time the woman said: “Go you, and get one o’ them there pies. I dare say they’ve come again now.

My darter ha’ ate five, five pies to-day. My darter ha’ ate five, five pies to-day.” The king was coming down the street, and he heard her sing, but what she sang he couldn’t hear, so he stopped and said: “What was that you were singing, my good woman?” The woman was ashamed to let him hear what her daughter had been doing, so she sang, instead of that: “My darter ha’ spun five, five skeins to-day.

The first two crusades brought the flower of European chivalry to Constantinople and restored that spiritual union between Eastern and Western Christendom that had been interrupted by the great schism of the Greek and Roman Churches.

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.

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.

I have come to the conclusion that a goodly number of the fables that pass under the name of the Samian slave, Aesop, were derived from India, probably from the same source whence the same tales were utilised in the Jatakas, or Birth-stories of Buddha.

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