Top 120 Richard Adams Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “All the world will be your enemy, Prince of a Thousand enemies. And when they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you; digger, listener, runner, Prince with the swift warning. Be cunning, and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed.”

— Richard Adams

2. “My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.”

— Richard Adams

3. “Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”

— Richard Adams

4. “Animals don’t behave like men,? he said. ‘If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don’t sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures’ lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.”

— Richard Adams

5. “You know how you let yourself think that everything will be all right if you can only get to a certain place or do a certain thing. But when you get there you find it’s not that simple.”

— Richard Adams

6. “My Chief Rabbit has told me to stay and defend this run, and until he says otherwise, I shall stay here. – Bigwig.”

— Richard Adams

7. “I’d rather succeed in doing what we can than fail to do what we can’t.”

— Richard Adams

8. “Men will never rest till they’ve spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals.”

— Richard Adams

9. “I’ve always said that Watership Down is not a book for children. I say: it’s a book, and anyone who wants to read it can read it.”

— Richard Adams

10. “Rabbits live close to death and when death comes closer than usual, thinking about survival leaves little room for anything else.”

— Richard Adams

11. “Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it.”

— Richard Adams

12. “To come to the end of a time of anxiety and fear! To feel the cloud that hung over us lift and disperse – that cloud that dulled the heart and made happiness no more than a memory! This at least is one joy that must have been known by almost every living creature.”

— Richard Adams

13. “Rabbits need dignity and above all the will to accept their fate.”

— Richard Adams

14. “We all have to meet our match sometime or other.”

— Richard Adams

15. “We are all human and fall short of where we need to be. We must never stop trying to be the best we can be.”

— Richard Adams

16. “One cloud feels lonely.”

— Richard Adams

17. “You’re trying to eat grass that isn’t there. Why don’t you give it a chance to grow?”

— Richard Adams

18. “A thing can be true and still be desperate folly.”

— Richard Adams

19. “Dangerous thing, a name. Someone might catch hold of you by it, mightn’t they?”

— Richard Adams

20. “Sooner or later, everyone has to meet his match.”

— Richard Adams

21. “There is nothing that cuts you down to size like coming to some strange and marvelous place where no one even stops to notice that you stare about you.”

— Richard Adams

22. “Lots of little Bigwigs, Hazel! Think of that, and tremble!”

— Richard Adams

23. “Some say that the Black Rabbit hates us and wants our destruction. But the truth is – or so they taught me – that he, too, serves Lord Frith and does no more than his appointed task.”

— Richard Adams

24. “I distinguish two types of human beings, Love people, who love the sky and the flowers, and Power People, who are essentially sold on naked power.”

— Richard Adams

25. “Our children’s children will hear a good story.”

— Richard Adams

26. “Who knows why men do anything?”

— Richard Adams

27. “Odysseus brings not one man to shore with him. Yet he sleeps sound beside Calypso and when he wakes thinks only of Penelope.”

— Richard Adams

28. “What is, is what must be.”

— Richard Adams

29. “A foraging wild creature, intent above all upon survival, is as strong as the grass.”

— Richard Adams

30. “The primroses were over.”

— Richard Adams

31. “He was part of my dream, of course – but then I was part of his dream, too. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass.”

— Richard Adams

32. “I don’t like straight lines: men make them.”

— Richard Adams

33. “He fought because he actually felt safer fighting than running.”

— Richard Adams

34. “Who wants to hear about brave deeds when he’s ashamed of his own, and who likes an open, honest tale from someone he’s deceiving?”

— Richard Adams

35. “We do not take moonlight for granted. It is like snow, or like dew on a July morning. It does not reveal but changes what it covers.”

— Richard Adams

36. “Captain,” said Bluebell, “do you know what the first blade of grass said to the second blade of grass?” Hazel looked at him sharply, but Holly replied, “Well?” “It said, ‘Look, there’s a rabbit! We’re in danger!”

— Richard Adams

37. “Silflay hraka, u embleer rah!”

— Richard Adams

38. “Silflay hraka, u embleer rah,” replied Bigwig.”

— Richard Adams

39. “You can’t call your life your own: and in return you have safety, if it’s worth having at the price you pay.”

— Richard Adams

40. “Your storm, Thlayli-rah. Use it.”

— Richard Adams

41. “There is not a day or night but a doe offers her life for her kittens, or some honest captain of Owsla his life for his Chief Rabbit’s. Sometimes it is taken, sometimes it is not. But there is no bargain, for here, what is, is what must be.”

— Richard Adams

42. “Frith meant us to get back,” replied Holly. “That’s the real reason why we’re here.”

— Richard Adams

43. “The rabbits mingled naturally. They did not talk for talking’s sake, in the artificial manner that human beings – and sometimes even their dogs and cats – do. But this did not mean that they were not communicating; merely that they were not communicating by talking.”

— Richard Adams

44. “And from that day to this, no power on earth can keep a rabbit out of a vegetable garden, for El-ahrairah prompts them with a thousand tricks, the best in the world.”

— Richard Adams

45. “For that matter, Odysseus himself might have borrowed a trick or two from the rabbit hero, for he is very old and was never at a loss for a trick to deceive his enemies.”

— Richard Adams

46. “Wisdom is found on the desolate hillside... where none comes to feed, and the stony bank where the rabbit scratches a hole in vain.”

— Richard Adams

47. “The Threarah doesn’t like anything he hasn’t thought of for himself.”

— Richard Adams

48. “Rabbits have enough enemies as it is. They ought not to make more among themselves.”

— Richard Adams

49. “Are you angry, El-ahrairah?’ asked Lord Frith. “‘No, my lord,’ replied El-ahrairah, ‘I am not angry. But I have learned that with creatures one loves, suffering is not the only thing for which one may pity them. A rabbit who does not know when a gift has made him safe is poorer than a slug, even though he may think otherwise himself.”

— Richard Adams

50. “People who record birdsong generally do it very early-before six o’clock-if they can. Soon after that, the invasion of distant noise in most woodland becomes too constant and too loud.”

— Richard Adams