Fables Quotes - Page 6

• Unbind the charms that in slight fables lie and teach that truth is truest poesy.

  Abraham Cowley

  Lying, Fiction, Truth Is

  Abraham Cowley, Samuel Johnson (1822). “The Poems of Abraham Cowley ...”, p.161

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• I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they're both amazing ways to understand human nature.

  Salman Rushdie

  Thinking, Talking, Two

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Surely all Americans have the right to give their money only to those causes which they support. But what kind of society has this created? A society where the ignorant reign. A society where enlightened must hold their tongues. A nation whose politicians must profess half-hearted devotion to an ancient fable or face the disastrous consequences of speaking their true mind.

  Christopher McCandless

  Giving, Support, Ignorant

  The Emory Wheel student newspaper, October 1987.

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• A film fable so structured that all alchemical searchings are clearly filmwise (gold being discovered cinematically in each sequence ot mixed black-and-white and color) so that when the drama-discovery is actually made, it acts as a deliberate anti-climax of aesthetic perfection.

  Stan Brakhage

  Drama, Black And White, Discovery

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• Men do not invent Myths. They only invent fables, and tell lies. True Myths create themselves, and find their expression in the men who serve their purpose.

  Denis Johnston

  Truth, Honesty, Lying

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• I cannot understand why the poets of our day wax indignant at the vulgarity of their age and complain of having come into the world too early or too late. I believe that every man of intellect can create his own beautiful fable of life.

  Gabriele d'Annunzio

  Beautiful, Believe, Men

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• [Jorge Luis Borges] had short stories, and I was trying to learn how to write short stories, and then he had these things in the middle that were like fables, and I loved hearing fables.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Writing, Trying, Stories

  Source: quod.lib.umich.edu

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• Willmott has very tersely said that embellished truths are the illuminated alphabet of larger children.

  Horace Mann

  Children, Alphabet, Said

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• [On Napoleon assuming power in France:] The time of Fable is over, the time of History has begun.

  Josephine de Beauharnais

  France, Assuming

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• National literature begins with fables and ends with novels.

  Joseph Joubert

  Literature, Ends, Novel

  Joseph Joubert (1896). “Pensées of Joubert”

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• O Charidas, what of the under world? Great darkness. And what of the resurrection? A lie. And Pluto? A fable; we perish utterly.

  Callimachus

  Lying, Darkness, World

  "Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology". Book by John William Mackail, p. 171, Epigram 14, 1906.

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• The bearers of fables are very welcome.

  Monique Wittig

  Welcome, Myth

  Monique Wittig (2007). “Les Guerilleres”, p.51, University of Illinois Press

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• For me, "Zoo" has always been a fable. It has nothing to do with realism. It's a fable about what man is doing to the world, and the animals have retribution. But in the real world, this would not happen. But in the world of 1984, this kind of thing can happen in a story.

  James Patterson

  Zoos, Real, Animal

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• In spite of the air of fablethe public were still not at all disposed to receive it as fable. I thence concluded that the facts of my narrative would prove of such a nature as to carry with them sufficient evidence of their own authenticity.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Reality, Air, Facts

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• As we are poetical in our natures, so we delight in fable.

  William Hazlitt

  Delight

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• There are not too many fables about man's misuse of sunflower seeds.

  Richard Brautigan

  Men, Sunflower, Misuse

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• When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women of your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Writing, Light, Hair

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• We must be compelled to hold this doctrine to be false, and the old and new law called the Old and New Testament, to be impositions, fables and forgeries.

  Thomas Paine

  Law, Religion, Doctrine

  Thomas Paine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1834). “The Theological Works of Thomas Paine: To which are Added the Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar”, p.241

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• So in the Libyan fable it is told That once an eagle, stricken with a dart, Said, when he saw the fashion of the shaft: With our own feathers, not by others' hands, Are we now smitten.

  Aeschylus

  Fashion, Eagles, Hands

  Aeschylus (1873). “The Tragedies of Æschylos: A New Translation, with a Biographical Essay, and an Appendix of Rhymed Choral Odes”, p.339

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• Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its)—Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world—a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious—surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.

  Walt Whitman

  School, Humanity, Democracy

  Walt Whitman (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Walt Whitman (Illustrated)”, p.1406, Delphi Classics

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• And when life's sweet fable ends, soul and body part like friends; no quarrels, murmurs, no delay; a kiss, a sigh, and so away.

  Richard Crashaw

  Death, Sweet, Kissing

  'Temperance' (1652)

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• Italianate Englishmen are incarnate devils ... for they first lustfully condemn God, then scornfully mock his word, and also spitefully hate and hurt all the well wishers thereof.... They count as fables the holy mysteries of religion.

  Roger Ascham

  Hurt, Hate, Scary

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• As to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours, that is on no ground credible. Even if some unknown landmass is there, and not just ocean, there was only one pair of original ancestors, and it is inconceivable that such distant regions should have been peopled by Adam's descendants.

  Saint Augustine

  Ocean, Men, Feet

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• Ah, reader, put thy trust in thy creator, and thou wilt be safe; but if thou trustest to the book called the scriptures thou trustest to the rotten staff of fable and falsehood.

  Thomas Paine

  Book, Religion, Rotten

  "The Thomas Paine Collection: Common Sense, Rights of Man, Age of Reason, An Essay on Dream, Biblical Blasphemy, Examination Of The Prophecies".

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• Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best? Is it the tanner who has barked it, or he who has boxed it for turpentine, whom posterity will fable to have been changed into a pine at last? No! no! it is the poet: he it is who makes the truest use of the pine-who does not fondle it with an axe, nor tickle it with a saw, nor stroke it with a plane. . . .

  Henry David Thoreau

  Love, Friendship, Nature

  Henry David Thoreau (2017). “HENRY DAVID THOREAU – The Man, The Philosopher & The Trailblazer (Illustrated): Biographies, Memoirs, Autobiographical Books & Personal Letters (Including Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, A Yankee in Canada…)”, p.597, e-artnow

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