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His own image; no longer a dark, gray bird, ugly and disagreeable to look at, but a graceful and beautiful swan. To be born in a duck's nest, in a farmyard, is of no consequence to a bird, if it is hatched from a swan's egg.

— Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales (1835)

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More quotes by Hans Christian Andersen

Death walks faster than the wind and never returns what he has taken.

Fairy Tales (1835)

Every man's life is a fairy-tale written by God's fingers.

They could see she was a real Princess and no question about it, now that she had felt one pea all the way through twenty mattresses and twenty more feather beds. Nobody but a Princess could be so delicate.

Fairy Tales (1835)

Under each arm he carries an umbrella; one of them, with pictures on the inside, he spreads over the good children, and then they dream the most beautiful stories the whole night. But the other umbrella has no pictures, and this he holds over the naughty children so that they sleep heavily, and wake in the morning without having dreamed at all.

Fairy Tales (1835)

Dance you shall,” said he, “dance in your red shoes till you are pale and cold, till your skin shrivels up and you are a skeleton! Dance you shall, from door to door, and where proud and wicked children live you shall knock, so that they may hear you and fear you! Dance you shall, dance—!

The Red Shoes (1845)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Hans Christian Andersen (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.