9 Quotes Tagged: king-arthur

"This is beyond understanding." said the king. "You are the wisest man alive. You know what is preparing. Why do you not make a plan to save yourself?"
And Merlin said quietly, "Because I am wise. In the combat between wisdom and feeling, wisdom never wins."

"Oh, what a lovely owl!" Cried the Wart.

But when he went up to it and held out his hand, the owl grew half as tall again, stood up as stiff as a poker, closed its eyes so that there was only the smallest slit to peep through - as you are in the habit of doing when told to shut your eyes at hide-and-seek - and said in a doubtful voice

"There is no owl."

Then it shut its eyes entirely and looked the other way.

"It is only a boy," said Merlyn.

"There is no boy," said the owl hopefully, without turning round.

So many scholars have spent so much time trying to establish whether Arthur ever existed at all that they have lost track of the single truth that he exists over and over.

And do you know another thing, Arthur? Life is too bitter already, without territories and wars and noble feuds.

Outside the window the thin moon stood upright in a deep sky, like the paring of a finger-nail for magic, and against the sky the weather vane of the carrion crow with arrow in mouth pointed it's arrow to the south

It is all true, or it ought to be; and more and better besides.

To many-towered Camelot

He did not see a hero of romance, but a plain man who had done his best — not a leader of chivalry, but the pupil who had tried to be faithful to his curious master, the magician, by thinking all the time — not Arthur of England, but a lonely old gentleman who had worn his crown for half a lifetime in the teeth of fate.

"I myself beheld the King
Charge at the head of all his Table Round,
And all his legions crying Christ and him,
And break them; and I saw him, after, stand
High on a heap of slain, from spur to plume
Red as the rising sun with heathen blood,
And seeing me, with a great voice he cried,
"They are broken, they are broken!" for the King,
However mild he seems at home, nor cares
For triumph in our mimic wars, the jousts — For if his own knight cast him down, he laughs
Saying, his knights are better men than he — Yet in this heathen war the fire of God
Fills him: I never saw his like: there lives
No greater leader."