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Andrew Lang Quotes

Andrew Lang was a Scottish poet, novelist, literary critic, and contributor to the field of anthropology. He is best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales. The Andrew Lang lectures at the University of St Andrews are named after him. Wikipedia  

✵ 31. March 1844 – 20. July 1912
Andrew Lang photo
Andrew Lang: 10   quotes 1   like

Famous Andrew Lang Quotes

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

Andrew Lang

1910 Speech, quoted in Alan L. Mackay The Harvest of a Quiet Eye (1977), as reported in Chambers Dictionary of Quotations (2005), p. 488.
Widely attributed to Lang (e.g. in Elizabeth M. Knowles, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Oxford University Press; and in Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, Columbia University Press).
Variant: He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts—for support rather than illumination.

“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

Source: Adventures Among Books

“You can cover a great deal of country in books.”

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

Andrew Lang (1900) "[ Anthropology and Religion]", In: The Making of Religion, (Chapter II), Longmans, Green, and C°, London, New York and Bombay, 1900, pp. 39–64.

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

Andrew Lang

Sonnet The Odyssey (1879), in Introduction to his translation (with S. H. Butcher) of Homer's Odyssey.

Andrew Lang Quotes

“If indeed there be a god in heaven.”

Andrew Lang

Andrew Lang (1879), with S. H. Butcher, prose translation of Homer's Odyssey, Book XVII, line 484.

God

“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

Ballades in Blue China (1880)

Pleasure , Joy

“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

Ballade of Autumn

Love , Men , Business , Autumn

“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

Ballades in Blue China (1880)

Lovers , Bird , Change

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