Fables Quotes - Page 4

• Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!

  Charles Lamb

  Thinking, Wife, Childhood

  Charles Lamb, Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd (1838). “The Works of Charles Lamb: To which are Prefixed, His Letters, and a Sketch of His Life”, p.118

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• I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.

  Margaret Atwood

  Animal, Moral, Ends

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• My parents read to me a lot as a kid, and I started writing very early, probably spurred on by Aesop's fables. Then they gave me The Lord of the Rings way too early for me to fully understand what I was reading, which was actually kind of cool. It was almost better - comprehension's overrated when you're reading.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Reading, Writing, Kids

  Source: www.esquire.com

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• Management and union may be likened to that serpent of the fables who on one body had two heads that fighting each other with poisoned fangs, killed themselves.

  Peter Drucker

  Fighting, Two, Body

  Peter F. Drucker (2017). “The New Society: The Anatomy of Industrial Order”, p.180, Routledge

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• Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables, yet we never quite give up the hope of finding them.

  Logan Pearsall Smith

  Friends, Dream, Giving Up

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• The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction can not so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.

  Herman Melville

  Fiction, Facts, Form

  Herman Melville, Douglas Robillard (2000). “The Poems of Herman Melville”, p.32, Kent State University Press

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• I am thoroughly tired of the fable style of narrative and shall do my best to get up something entirely different and possibly little more worthy.

  George Ade

  Tired, Style, Different

  George Ade (1973). “Letters of George Ade”

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• No matter how carefully records are kept and filed and computerized, they grow fuzzy with time. Stories grow by accretion. Tales accumulate--like dust. The longer the time lapse, the dustier the history--until it degenerates into fables.

  Isaac Asimov

  Dust, History, Lapses

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• I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an allegory -- a vain and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the demonstration of some moral truth.

  Luigi Pirandello

  Art, Hate, Order

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• Fable has strong shoulders that carry far more truth than fact can.

  Barry Hughart

  Strong, Facts, Shoulders

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• It is hard for many people to give up the religion in which they were born; to admit that their fathers were utterly mistaken, and that the sacred records of their country are but collections of myths and fables.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Country, Giving Up, Father

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.314, Library of Alexandria

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• The fable of a god or gods visiting the earth did not originate with Christianity.

  Richard Carlile

  Earth, Christianity, Visiting

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• To me [Christianity] was all nonsense based on that profane compilation of fables called the Bible.

  Bill Haywood

  Christianity, Nonsense, Compilation

  Big Bill Haywood (1929). “Bill Haywood's book”

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• Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk rejection, ridicule and failure. As you follow the quest for stories told with meaning and beauty, study thoughtfully but write boldly. Then, like the hero of the fable, your dance will dazzle the world.

  Robert McKee

  Hero, Writing, Skills

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• Human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable. We are inveterate storytellers.

  Beeban Kidron

  Motivation, Inspiration, Parables

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• Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. This is a mental illness. It is like looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. It is as if you are living in a fantasy world of a fable. This is an interesting and sad syndrome. I’m sure that I have that syndrome. If it’s not it, then why the heck does my every moment with the ordinary girl feel like a fable?

  Joo Won

  Girl, Interesting, Ordinary

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• The profession of a prostitute is the only career in which the maximum income is paid to the newest apprentice. It is the one calling in which at the beginning the only exertion is that of self-indulgence; all the prizes are at the commencement. It is the ever-new embodiment of the old fable of the sale of the soul to the Devil. The tempter offers wealth, comfort, excitement, but in return the victim must sell her soul, nor does the other party forget to exact his due to the uttermost farthing.

  William Booth

  Party, Self, Careers

  William Booth (2014). “In Darkest England and the Way Out”, p.51, Cambridge University Press

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• Christianity is an old metaphysical fiction, stuffed with fables, contradictions and absurdities: it was spawned in the fevered imagination of the Orientals, and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, where some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it and where some imbeciles actually believed it.

  Frederick The Great

  Europe, Imagination, Fiction

  Attributed to Frederick II of Prussia in "Civilization: The West and the Rest", Book by Niall Ferguson, 2011.

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• I think it better to keep a profound silence with regard to the Christian fables, which are canonized by their antiquity and the credulity of absurd and insipid people.

  Frederick The Great

  Christian, Thinking, People

  Letter 37 to Voltaire on June 1738. "Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great", translated by Richard Aldington, 1927.

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• Not stories told by wolf or man to frighten children, of Wolfbane and of werewolves, of grasht and goblins and of silly vampires, fables to frighten cowards with the threat of evil and of sin. But the power that lives beyond those stories, and makes them strong indeed, that lives in nightmares and in sleep. That is ribbed into the very fabric of conscious being. The power of love and hate.

  David Clement-Davies

  Strong, Children, Hate

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• Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.

  Carl Sagan

  Goal, Custodians, Purpose

  Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan (2011). “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space”, p.76, Ballantine Books

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• The myriad-minded man, our, and all men's, Shakespeare, has in this piece presented us with a legitimate farce in exactest consonance with the philosophical principles and character of farce, as distinguished from comedy and from entertainments. A proper farce is mainly distinguished from comedy by the licence allowed, and even required, in the fable, in order to produce strange and laughable situations. The story need not be probable, it is enough that it is possible.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Philosophical, Character, Men

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2015). “Shakespeare, With Introductory Matter on Poetry, The Drama, and The Stage by S.T. Coleridge: Coleridge’s Essays and Lectures on Shakespeare and Other Old Poets and Dramatists”, p.61, e-artnow

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• Death's a fable. Did not Heaven inspire your equal Elements with living Fire blown from the Spring of Life? Is not that breath Immortal? Come; ye are as free from death as He that made ye: Can the flames expire which he kindled?

  Francis Quarles

  Death, Spring, Fire

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• The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every State which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the Northern forests who were.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Children, Vigor, Stories

  Henry David Thoreau (2010). “Wild Apples and Other Natural History Essays”, p.75, University of Georgia Press

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• Something about the possession of a book - an object that can contain infinite fables, words of wisdom, chronicles of times gone by, humorous anecdotes and divine revelation - endows the reader with the power of creating a story, and the listener with a sense of being present at the moment of creation.

  Alberto Manguel

  Book, Humorous, Creating

  "A History of Reading". Book by Alberto Manguel, 1996.

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