44 Inspiring Fairy Tale Quotes

Fairy tales have always been more than just stories for children. They are timeless narratives that weave together themes of bravery, love, and transformation, often imparting profound wisdom along the way. Whether it's the courage of a small hero standing up against formidable odds or the enchantment of a world where magic reigns supreme, these fairy tales inspire and captivate audiences of all ages. In exploring this collection of the top 44 inspiring fairy tale quotes, we delve into the enchanting words that have sparked imagination and hope across generations. Join us as we journey through these magical tales and discover the timeless lessons they offer.

1. “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” - Albert Einstein

2. “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” - Neil Gaiman

3. “The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.” - W.H. Auden

4. “If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales.” - G.K. Chesterton

5. “The fairy tale is not the conclusion, but the doorway to a more brilliant reality. Pushed onto a pedestal as the final answer their worth is misshapen and distorted. The world’s story may end with a couple living happily ever after but our life in Christ enables the intimacy of the human relationship to illuminate an eternal perfection. In a balanced perspective, neither denigrated nor exalted from their intended place, fairy tales are a lovely and exhilarating part of life.” - Natalie Nyquist

6. “There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire.” - Neil Gaiman

7. “Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws.” - Alice Hoffman

8. “Can you not see," I said, "that fairy tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforward; but that this everlasting fiction about modern life is in its nature essentially incredible? Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is—what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is—what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.” - G.K. Chesterton

9. “Many readers simply can't stomach fantasy. They immediately picture elves with broadswords or mighty-thewed barbarians with battle axes, seeking the bejeweled Coronet of Obeisance ... (But) the best fantasies pull aside the velvet curtain of mere appearance. ... In most instances, fantasy ultimately returns us to our own now re-enchanted world, reminding us that it is neither prosaic nor meaningless, and that how we live and what we do truly matters.” - Michael Dirda

10. “Classic fairy tales do not deny the existence of heartache and sorrow, but they do deny universal defeat.” - Greenhaven Press

11. “We may say that the characters in fairytales are ‘good to think with’…[and that] the job of the fairytale is to show that Why? questions cannot be answered except in one way: by telling the stories. The story does not contain the answer, it is the answer.” - Brian Wicker

12. “Did I ever tell you the difference between a Northern fairy tale and a Southern one?" she asked him, indulging herself and letting her head rest on his shoulder. God, he felt good. Her man. Where her head was meant to lie, right there, on him. "What's the difference?""A Northern one starts 'once upon a time,' while a Southern one starts 'y'all ain't going to believe this shit.” - Erin McCarthy

13. “What I mean is, all the terrible things that happen in fairy tales seem real. Or not real, but genuine. Life is unfair, and the bad guys keep winning and good people die. But I like how that's not always the end of it...Evil is real, but so is good. They always say fairy tales are simplistic, black and white, but I don't think so. I think they're complicated. That's what I love about them.” - Polly Shulman

14. “That's the thing about being the product of happily marries parents, You grow up thinking the fairy tale is real, and more than that, you think you're entitled to live it. So far, though, it wasn't working out as planned.” - Nicholas Sparks

15. “But wishes are only granted in fairy tales.” - Simone Elkeles

16. “You are the fairy tale told by your ancestors.” - Toba Beta

17. “Dear Prince, I must leave you, but I will never forget you, and next spring I will bring you back two beautiful jewels in place of those you have given away. The ruby shall be redder than a red rose, and the sapphire shall be as blue as the great sea.” - Oscar Wilde

18. “When you enter the woods of a fairy tale and it is night, the trees tower on either side of the path. They loom large because everything in the world of fairy tales is blown out of proportion. If the owl shouts, the otherwise deathly silence magnifies its call. The tasks you are given to do (by the witch, by the stepmother, by the wise old woman) are insurmountable - pull a single hair from the crescent moon bear's throat; separate a bowl's worth of poppy seeds from a pile of dirt. The forest seems endless. But when you do reach the daylight, triumphantly carrying the particular hair or having outwitted the wolf; when the owl is once again a shy bird and the trees only a lush canopy filtering the sun, the world is forever changed for your having seen it otherwise. From now on, when you come upon darkness, you'll know it has dimension. You'll know how closely poppy seeds and dirt resemble each other. The forest will be just another story that has absorbed you, taken you through its paces, and cast you out again to your home with its rattling windows and empty refrigerator - to your meager livelihood, which demands, inevitably, that you write about it.” - Elizabeth J. Andrew

19. “What Grimm fairy tale featured apiarian morphing humans?” - Solange nicole

20. “We are in this fairyland on sufferance; it is not for us to quarrel with the conditions under which we enjoy this wild vision of the world.” - G.K. Chesterton

21. “Did you recently turn into a jerk or have you been one since birth?” - Priya Ardis

22. “Soft sun shone down on a misty cathedral at the opposite end of a football-field length courtyard. The cathedral had a long pointed tower with beautiful rose and ivory stained glass windows. Pink-petal flowers and deep green ivy climbed the stones from the ground to it’s roof. A large fountain stood in the middle of the courtyard with water falling from several lion’s heads. Between the misty air and rolling slope of the earth, the grounds reminded me of a long lost fairy tale.” - Priya Ardis

23. “Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.” - A.S. Byatt

24. “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.” - Terri Windling

25. “I've discovered as I've grown up that life is far more complicated than you think it is when you're a kid. It isn't just a straightforward fairytale.” - Rachel McAdams

26. “The combination of razor-sharp wit (completely real) and his credentials (completely fake) had won them over in the end.” - Priya Ardis

27. “Well, can you tell her that?"He looked down at his feet. "I will. I will."Guy-speak for, "I plan to keep avoiding her until she gives up.” - Priya Ardis

28. “The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments, not only for its own characters caught in its own plotlines; it offers magical metamorphoses to the one who opens the door, who passes on what was found there, and to those who hear what the storyteller brings. The faculty of wonder, like curiosity can make things happen; it is time for wishful thinking to have its due.” - Marina Warner

29. “I wish for my child to have a mind as stark and wild as the winter, a spirit as clear and fine as my window, and a heart as red and open as my wounded hand.” - Catherynne M. Valente

30. “When assaulted by sexual knowledge for the first time, a girl plunges into a period of blackness, which is required in order to let her emotions catch up with her body.Sleeping Beauty sleeps. Cinderella waits, and while she waits she works her way through the darkness of depression. Snow White both works and sleeps before she is ready to open her eyes and find a Prince leaning over her.” - Joan Gould

31. “The happily ever after thing. It's great when she marries the prince or whatever and they say that. But they just don't show the part where there's a revolution and they drag her to the guillotine.” - Mark D. Diehl

32. “I fear nothing when I am doing right,' said Jack.'Then,' said the lady in the red cap, 'you are one of those who slay giants.” - Andrew Lang

33. “It doesn't matter if you're born in a duck yard, so long as you are hatched from a swan's egg!” - Hans Christian Andersen

34. “Why should I laugh?' asked the old man. 'Madness in youth is true wisdom. Go, young man, follow your dream, and if you do not find the happiness that you seek, at any rate you will have had the happiness of seeking it.” - Andrew Lang

35. “Beware a kiss, he told her. Kisses are powerful things. You expose part of your soul.” - Ruth Frances Long

36. “The world is a fairy tale; we are its guardians.” - Dejan Stojanovic

37. “Since there are thousands of fairy tales, one may safely guess that there are probably equal numbers where the courage and determination of females rescue males, and vice versa.” - Bruno Bettelheim

38. “Truly, there is magic in fairy tales.For it takes but a simply-uttered 'Once upon a time...' to allure and spellbind an audience.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

39. “In stories like Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, they always say the heroine is 'as good as she is beautiful.' I wondered if people just wanted that to be true, wanted the beautiful to be good. I wondered if they wanted the ugly to be bad because then they wouldn't have to feel bad for them.” - Alex Flinn

40. “Seeing the transformation in Aaron made me wonder how it would feel to have someone-even a not-so-nice guy like Aaron- look at me the way he looked at Anjali.” - Polly Shulman

41. “Contemporary writers use animal-transformation themes to explore issues of gender, sexuality, race, culture, and the process of transformation...just as storytellers have done, all over the world, for many centuries past. One distinct change marks modern retellings, however, reflecting our changed relationship to animals and nature. In a society in which most of us will never encounter true danger in the woods, the big white bear who comes knocking at the door [in fairy tales] is not such a frightening prospective husband now; instead, he's exotic, almost appealing.Whereas once wilderness was threatening to civilization, now it's been tamed and cultivated; the dangers of the animal world have a nostalgic quality, removed as they are from our daily existence. This removal gives "the wild" a different kind of power; it's something we long for rather than fear. The shape-shifter, the were-creature, the stag-headed god from the heart of the woods--they come from a place we'd almost forgotten: the untracked forests of the past; the primeval forests of the mythic imagination; the forests of our childhood fantasies: untouched, unspoiled, limitless.Likewise, tales of Animal Brides and Bridegrooms are steeped in an ancient magic and yet powerfully relevant to our lives today. They remind us of the wild within us...and also within our lovers and spouses, the part of them we can never quite know. They represent the Others who live beside us--cat and mouse and coyote and owl--and the Others who live only in the dreams and nightmares of our imaginations. For thousands of years, their tales have emerged from the place where we draw the boundary lines between animals and human beings, the natural world and civilization, women and men, magic and illusion, fiction and the lives we live.” - Terri Windling

42. “But most dragons seem to have interesting personalities--besides probably having quite good reasons for what they do, if only one could understand them” - Diana Wynne Jones

43. “I'll tell you a secret about storytelling. Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty... were not perfect in the beginning. It's only a happy ending on the last page, right? If the princess had everything from the beginning, there wouldn't be a story. Anyone who is imperfect or incomplete can become the main character in the story.” - Peach-Pit

44. “Fairy tales are rife with transformation — from beast to handsome prince, from dirty scullery maid to well-dressed princess. It is perhaps no coincidence that nature in the Cinderella stories facilitates transformation, for nature itself is a changeable thing, from season to season, from a sunny day to rain, from an egg to a flying bird in a matter of weeks.(Source: "The Nature of Cinderella".)” - Marie Rutkoski