Cautionary Tales Quotes

Learning what not to do is sometimes more important than learning what to do.

One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again.

Most songs that aren't jump-rope songs, or lullabies, are cautionary tales or goodbye songs and road songs.

sleepin with strangers will have you waking with enemies!

How could you tell children they were playing with fire if they´d never had the experience of being burned?

I tell you this as a cautionary tale: beware of getting what you want. It's bound to disappoint you.

History is a vast early warning system.

From the time we're born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and coconspirators, our role models and our cautionary tales.

I don;t think there's anything wrong with being a dreamer. There is not. But dreams have ways of turning into nightmares.

He had read books, newspapers and magazines. He knew that if you ran away you sometimes met bad people who did bad things to you; but he had also read fairy tales, so he knew that there were kind people out there, side by side with the monsters.

When I went to bed as a child, I was told, 'You don't know where you'll wake up.' When I ran in the garden, I was told that running was bad for the heart. Everything had its sinister aspect - milk shrinks the stomach, lemon thins the blood.

Fairytales were never really meant for children; they were meant as cautionary tales for teenagers on the verge of growing up.

If there's one thing that a study of history has taught us, it is that things can always get worse.

To understand a field, you look at its arts. Arts can be cautionary as well as inspiring.

The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid.

Ladies who play with fire must remember that smoke gets in their eyes.

The burnt child dreads the fire.

Be careful what you ask of Heaven; it might be granted.

While Fledging is a different type of book, The Parable series serve as cautionary tales. I wrote the Parable books because of the direction of the country. You can call it save the world fiction, but it clearly doesn't save anything.

Walls have ears. Doors have eyes. Trees have voices. Beasts tell lies. Beware the rain. Beware the snow. Beware the man You think you know. -Songs of Sapphique

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.

Novels do not force their fair readers to sin, they only instruct them how to sin; the consequences of which are fully detailed, and not in a way calculated to seduce any but weak but weak minds; few of their heroines are happily disposed of.

Kids can relate to having some scary person living near their house. They can relate to, 'Hey, don't go near that house.' We all can.

[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.

My stories are warnings; they're not predictions. If they were predictions, I wouldn't do them. Because then I'd be part of the doom-ridden psychology. But every time I name a problem, I try to give a solution.