The Water Babies Quotes

“The most wonderful and the strongest things in the world, you know, are just the things which no one can see.”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby

“Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies

“Do as you would be done by.”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies

“In fact, the fairies had turned him into a water-baby.
A water-baby?  You never heard of a water-baby.  Perhaps not.  That is the very reason why this story was written. 
(...)
"But there are no such things as water-babies."
How do you know that?  Have you been there to see?  And if you had been there to see, and had seen none, that would not prove that there were none.  If Mr. Garth does not find a fox in Eversley Wood—as folks sometimes fear he never will—that does not prove that there are no such things as foxes.  And as is Eversley Wood to all the woods in England, so are the waters we know to all the waters in the world.  And no one has a right to say that no water-babies exist, till they have seen no water-babies existing; which is quite a different thing, mind, from not seeing water-babies; and a thing which nobody ever did, or perhaps ever will do.”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies: A Fairy Tale For a Land Baby

“Stop!" said the Irishwoman. "I have one more word for you both; for you will both see me again before all is over. Those that wish to be clean, clean they will be; and those that wish to be foul, foul they will be. Remember.”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies

“And what was the song which she sang? Ah, my little man, I am too old to sing that song, and you too young to understand it.”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies

“[...] his little whirl-about of a head was so full of the notion of going out to see the world, that it forgot her in five minutes: however, though his head forgot her, I am glad to say his heart did not.”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies

“Some people think that there are no fairies. But it is a wide world, and plenty of room in it for fairies, without people seeing them; unless, of course, they look in the right place.”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies

“...children always wake after they have slept exactly as long as is good for them..”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies

“There must be fairies; for this is a fairy tale: and how can one have a fairy tale if there are no fairies?”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath elsewhere had its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God, who is our home.”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies

“Those that wish to be clean, clean they will be; and those that wish to be foul, foul they will be. Remember.”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies

“A great man of science ... knows everything about everything, except why a hen's egg does not turn into a crocodile and two or three other little things."
http://diggingupthefuture.wordpress.com/”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies

“The most wonderful and the strongest things in the world, you know, are just the things which no one can see. There is life in you; and it is the life in you which makes you grow, and move, and think: and yet you can't see it. And there is steam in a steam-engine; and that is what makes it move: and yet you can't see it; and so there may be fairies in the world, and they may be just what makes the world go round to the old tune of "C'est l'amour, l'amour, l'amour
Qui fait la monde à la ronde:"
and yet no one may be able to see them except those whose hearts are going round to that same tune.”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies

“...They were strange and ugly and wrong and horrible, and it all began to come back to him, they were men.”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies

“...People's souls make their bodies, just as a snail makes its shell.”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies

“Oh, don’t hurt me!” cried Tom. “I only want to look at you; you are so handsome.”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies

“But they are true republicans, these hoodies, who do everyone just what he likes, and make other people do so too; so that, for any freedom of speech, thought, or action, which is allowed among them, they might as well be American citizens of the new school.”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby

“bush, as little children should, kept them always at lessons, working, working, working, learning week-day lessons all week-days, and Sunday lessons all Sunday, and weekly examinations every Saturday, and monthly examinations every month, and yearly examinations every year, everything seven times over, as if once was not enough, and enough as good as a feast—till their brains grew big, and their bodies grew small, and they were all changed into turnips, with little but water inside; and still their foolish parents actually pick the leaves off them as fast as they grow, lest they should have anything green about them.”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby

“You see,’ said the stick, ‘there were as pretty little children once as you could wish to see, and might have been so still if they had been only left to grow up like human beings, and then handed over to me; but their foolish fathers and mothers, instead of letting them pick flowers, and make dirt-pies, and get birds’ nests, and dance round the gooseberry”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby

“Pues si los cambios que experimentan los animales inferiores son tan maravillosos y difíciles de descubrir, ¿por qué no habría de haber cambios igual de maravillosos o más, e igualmente difíciles de descubrir, en los seres superiores? ¿No”
― Charles Kingsley, Los niños del agua

“you will believe the one true doctrine of this wonderful fairy tale; which is, that your soul makes your body, just as a snail makes his shell.”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies

“Am I in earnest? Oh dear no! Don't you know that this is a fairy tale, and all fun and pretence; and that you are not to believe one word of it, even if it is true?”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies

“He was, as I said, a very great naturalist, and chief professor of Necrobioneopalaeonthydrochthonanthropopithekology in the new university which the king of the Cannibal Islands had founded; and, being a member of the Acclimatisation Society, he had come here to collect all the nasty things which he could find on the coast of England, and turn them loose round the Cannibal Islands, because they had not nasty things enough there to eat what they left.”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies

“You must expect to be beat a few times in your life, little man, if you live such a life as a man ought to live, let you be as strong and healthy as you may: and when you are, you will find it a very ugly feeling. I hope that that day you may have a stout staunch friend by you who is not beat; for, if you have not, you had best lie where you are, and wait for better times,”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies