Andrew Lang Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts—for support rather than illumination.

Andrew Lang
They need only adapt to the circumstances that old Lydian tradition which says that games of chance were invented during great famine. Men permitted themselves to eat only every second day, and tried to forget their hunger by playing at draughts and dice.

Andrew Lang
They hear like ocean on a western beach
The surge and thunder of the Odyssey.

Andrew Lang
Again, if there are really no fairies, why do people believe in them, all over the world? The ancient Greeks believed, so did the old Egyptians, and the Hindoos, and the Red Indians, and is it likely, if there are no fairies, that so many different peoples would have seen and heard them?

Andrew Lang
A book is a friend whose face is constantly changing. If you read it when you are recovering from an illness, and return to it years after, it is changed surely, with the change in yourself.

Andrew Lang
.. had I a river I would gladly let all honest anglers that use the fly cast line in it, but, but where there is no protection, then nets, poison, dynamite, slaughter of fingerlings, and unholy baits devastate the fish, so that 'free fishing' spells no fishing at all.

Andrew Lang
But science, like the spear of Achilles, can cure the wounds which herself inflicts.

Andrew Lang
The windy lights of Autumn flare;
I watch the moonlit sails go by;
I marvel how men toil and fare,
The weary business that they play!
Their voyaging is vanity,
And fairy gold is all their gain,
And all the winds of winter cry,
My Love returns no more again.

Andrew Lang
Not in the waste beyond the swamps and sand
The fever-haunted forest and lagoon,
Mysterious Kor, thy walls forsaken stand,
Thy lonely towers beneath a lonely moon.
The world is disenchanted.

Andrew Lang
Politicians use statistics in the same way that a drunk uses lamp-posts—for support rather than illumination.

Andrew Lang
Here's a pot with a cot in a park
In a park where the peach-blossoms blew,
Where the lovers eloped in the dark,
Lived, died and were changed into two
Bright birds that eternally flew
Through the boughs of the may, as they sang;
'T is a tale was undoubtedly true
In the reign of the Emperor Hwang.

Andrew Lang
O grant me a house by the beach of a bay, Where the waves can be surly in winter, and play With the sea-weed in summer, ye bountiful powers! And I'd leave all the hurry, the noise, and the fray, For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.

Andrew Lang
Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend a course of reading. Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for books read all of them. There is no other course.

Andrew Lang
St Andrews by the Northern sea,
A haunted town it is to me!

Andrew Lang
You can cover a great deal of country in books.

Andrew Lang
If the wild bowler thinks he bowls,
Or if the batsman thinks he's bowled,
They know not, poor misguided souls,
They too shall perish unconsoled.
I am the batsman and the bat,
I am the bowler and the ball.

Andrew Lang
There's a joy without canker or cark,
There's a pleasure eternally new,
'T is to gloat on the glaze and the mark
Of china that's ancient and blue.

Andrew Lang
Among the various forms of science which are reaching and affecting the new popular tradition, we have reckoned Anthropology. Pleasantly enough, Anthropology has herself but recently emerged from that limbo of the unrecognised in which Psychical Research is pining.

Andrew Lang