Top 1200 Old Wives Tales Quotes & Sayings

Boys like romantic [fairy] tales; but babies like realistic tales - because they find them romantic...This proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost prenatal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

My grandmother was born in 1900, and she would regale me with tales I call 'Little House on the Prairie' tales, but they were tales of segregated and racist America growing up in Alabama and Mississippi, where she came from.

My inspiration is my life, what I see happening around me. It can be history and, quite often, plain traditional fairy tales. But I never adapt; I nourish myself with old stories, and then create my own tales.

Men who marry wives very much superior to themselves are not so truly husbands to their wives as they are unawares made slaves to their position.

I wished that, for once, faery tales – real faery tales, not Disney fairy tales – would have a happy ending.

Pay heed to the tales of old wives. It may well be that they alone keep in memory what it was once needful for the wise to know.

The great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text.

For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay.

A slow smile had curved St. Vincent's lips. 'Wives are a different case altogether. They require a great deal of effort but the rewards are substantial. I highly recommend wives. Especially one's own.

My grandfather was a polygamous man, and he had two wives, and between him and his two wives, we are about 200 or so in our family.

So we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies.

I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen." [From a column dated November 17, 1928]

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

I learned an invaluable lesson from a kid in Argentina when we were playing Buenos Aires in 2002. I came out of the hotel and this 16-year-old-boy asked me to sign his copy of my Six Wives of Henry VIII album. As I was signing it I asked him 'what does a 16 year-old like about this old music?' and he looked at me, quite hurt, and said, 'it might be old to you, Mr Wakeman, but I only heard it for the first time last week. When you hear something for the first time, it's new.' I've never forgotten that.

All the tales of miracles, with which the Old and New Testament are filled, are fit only for impostors to preach and fools to believe.

Once upon a time fairy tales were told to audiences of young and old alike. It is only in the last century that such tales were deemed fit only for small children, stripped of much of their original complexity, sensuality, and power to frighten and delight.

The wives who are not deserted, but who have to feed and clothe and comfort and scold and advise, are the true objects of commiseration; wives whose existence is given over to a ceaseless vigil of cantankerous affection.

I have very happy memories of fairy tales. My mother used to take me to the library in Toronto to check out the fairy tales. And she was an actress, so she used to act out for me the different characters in all these fairy tales.

The fairy tale that really scared me was Bluebeard. That's the one where he just kills one after another of these woman, these wives, that he lures up to the castle. I just think about fairy tales as stories women told their children to warn them? To keep them safe, to make sure they married up, all the things that would have safeguarded them in the olden days.

Though now we think of fairy tales as stories intended for very young children, this is a relatively modern idea. In the oral tradition, magical stories were enjoyed by listeners young and old alike, while literary fairy tales (including most of the tales that are best known today) were published primarily for adult readers until the 19th century.

Fairy tales and folk tales have always played a role in my writing in one way or another.

In kindergarten that used to be my job, to tell them fairytales. I liked Hans Christian Andersen, and the Grimm fairy tales, all the classic fairy tales.

I have a daughter, Hanna, and I never read fairy tales to her. But I did tell her bedtime tales and made up many tales involving 'Gory the Goblin' and other creatures that I borrowed from the Grimms' tales and other tales I knew.

Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!

A few years ago one of my wives, when talking about wives leaving their husbands said, 'I wish my husband's wives would leave him, every soul of them except myself.' That is the way they all feel, more or less, at times, both old and young.

He tells old wives' tales much to the point.

Fairy tales and folk tales are part of the DNA of all stories and great fun to write.

And all over the world, the old literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads.

I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis.

When fairy tales are written in the west, they're known as folklore. In the east, fairy tales are called religions.

We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, We Poets of the proud old lineage Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest.

Bachelors' wives and old maids' children are always perfect.

The wise old fairy tales never were so silly as to say that the prince and the princess lived peacefully ever afterwards. The fairy tales said that the prince and princess lived happily ever afterwards; and so they did. They lived happily, although it is very likely that from time to time they threw the furniture at each other.

The fact that fairy tales remain a literary underdog - undervalued and undermined - even as they shape so many popular stories, redoubles my certainty that it is time for contemporary fairy tales to be celebrated in a popular, literary collection. Fairy tales hold the secret to reading.

'The Tales' are an important part of 'Hollow City,' when the kids discover secrets encoded in them that end up saving their lives. I wrote two tales as part of 'Hollow City,' and spent the next couple of years finishing the trilogy but itching to write more tales.

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.

Is there anything more tedious than the often repeated tales of the old and forgetful?

People say, "Look, your book [Tales and Wisdom from Duck Dynasty's Favorite Uncle] is about tall tales." And I said, "No, you don't understand, OK? The book is tall tales, OK, by me. But look, those tall tales are my life, OK? And look, I added some spices in there. That's the five percent. You know the one about the wolves chasing me? The only thing about that - they wasn't wolves, they was coyotes".

I think that Shakespeare himself raided fairy tales and chronicle writers, and he always looked to people who worked in the mythic genres, whether it was folk tales or popular novels.

In 1940 I was just turning 5 years old and being taken to the movies. For those of us who were not old enough to understand the horror of war it was a very romantic era because these guys were kissing their wives and girlfriends goodbye and going off to fight and become heroes.

There once was an old man of Lyme who married three wives at a time when asked, 'Why a third?' he replied 'One's absurd! and bigamy, sir, is a crime!'

Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses.

I think it is typical for many men to have problems when their wives make more money then they do, or when their wives are higher on the corporate ladder than they find themselves. I think that often is an issue.

Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives' tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.

Jokes spread around the world and embed themselves in our shared culture; the most resonant of them get lodged in the language in the same way as clichés or old wives' tales do.

People have been dealing with health long before there was science, certainly before nutrition science. We're constantly reading about scientific studies that support old wives' tales.

The universities do not teach all things ... so a doctor must seek out old wives, gypsies, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them. A doctor must be a traveller . . . Knowledge is experience.

[Fairy tales] are like a journey to the woods and the many ways you can get lost. Some people say it's not a good idea to read fairy tales to anyone under the age of eight because they are brutal and raw. When I was a kid I often felt that kids's books were speaking down to me, but I never felt that way about fairy tales. They are bloody and scary, but so is life.

Most Indians are concerned about their wives and children. But when I read the script of 'LoC,' I realised that the jawans giving their lives for the country do not think of their wives and families. My thoughts and prayers go out to them.

Many people think fairy tales and retellings of fairy tales are only for children, but I'm not the only writer to take an old tale and retell it for a sophisticated adult audience.

Right Jo better be happy old maids than unhappy wives or unmaidenly girls running about to find husbands.

People have always told tales. Long before humanity learned to write and gradually became literate, everybody told tales to everybody else and everybody listened to everybody else's tales. Before long it became clear that some of the still illiterate storytellers told more and better tales than others, that is, they could make more people believe their lies.

Time turns the old days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives.

If any of you will deny the plurality of wives and continue to do so, I promise that you will be damned…I wish more of our young men would take to themselves wives of the daughters of Zion, and not wait for us old men to take them all; go ahead upon the right principle, young gentlemen, and God bless you forever and ever and make you fruitful , that we may fill the mountains and then the earth with righteous inhabitants.

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

Old wives' tales are not enough in a day when old wives and old men, too, are constantly moving away from their labours.

In L.A., wives can fly on the plane; with the Yankees, they can't. With other teams, the wives always have functions to bring them together. Not here. You don't know what half the wives look like.

I didn't like fairy tales when I was younger. I found a lot of fairy tales scary. They really didn't sit well with me.

I think almost everybody enjoyed fairy tales when they were young, tales of witches and ogres and monsters and dragons and so forth. You get a little bit older, you can't read fairy tales any more.

I'm a polygamist. I can afford to have as many wives as I can afford to have. All Africans believe in it. My dad has four wives.