24 Quotes by Joseph Jacobs

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The great problems of the Twentieth century will have immediate relation to the discoveries of America, of Africa, and of Australia.

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.