Fables Quotes - Page 8

• Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.

  Edward Abbey

  Kings, Years, Realization

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.18, RosettaBooks

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• History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?

  Dan Brown

  Inspirational, Motivational, Book

  Dan Brown (2004). “The Da Vinci Code”, Doubleday Books

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• Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Night, Scott Fitzgerald, Novel

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• I was brought up, as a lot of kids are, on 'Aesop's Fables,' 'Brothers Grimm,' 'La Fontaine,' all those sorts of things. Hans Christian Andersen is a hero of mine.

  Michael Morpurgo

  Christian, Brother, Hero

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• There are, after all, atheists who say they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the requisite disbelief, or who have relinquished belief only with regret. To this I reply: who wishes that there was a permanent, unalterable celestial despotism that subjected us to continual surveillance and could convict us of thought-crime, and who regarded us as its private property even after we died? How happy we ought to be, at the reflection that there exists not a shred of respectable evidence to support such a horrible hypothesis.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Atheist, Regret, Reflection

  Christopher Hitchens (2007). “The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever”, p.17, Hachette UK

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• I have examined all of the known superstitions of the world and i do not find our superstitions of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all founded on fables and mythology. Christianity has made one-half of the world fools and the other half Hypocrites

  Thomas Jefferson

  Death, Hypocrite, Half

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• As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper.

  Salman Rushdie

  Wind, Soul, Skins

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• RABBLE, n. In a republic, those who exercise a supreme authority tempered by fraudulent elections. The rabble is like the sacred Simurgh, of Arabian fable - omnipotent on condition that it do nothing.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Exercise, Republic, Sacred

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)”, p.2491, Delphi Classics

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• We have a dangerous trend beginning to take place in our education. We're starting to put more and more textbooks into our schools. We've become accustomed of late of putting little books into the hands of children, containing fables and moral lessons. We're spending less time in the classroom on the Bible, which should be the principal text in our schools. The Bible states these great moral lessons better than any other man-made book.

  Fisher Ames

  Inspirational, Life, Bible

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• Jacqueline Carey has created a postmodern fable of enormous scope and force. Santa Olivia is at once a cautionary tale of people caught in a web of lies and creeping terror, and a love song to the beauty and power of being different. At the novel's heart is the kind of grace Carey is known for: an illumination of the strength that lies hidden inside all of us.

  Eric Van Lustbader

  Song, Lying, Heart

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• That's an animal fable about humility. If you survive your mistake, you must learn from it. Accept that you're fragile, vulnerable, and sometimes stupid. Realize that you're not immortal and you've got to take care of yourself. And then laugh it off and fly away.

  Marc Maron

  Mistake, Stupid, Humility

  Marc Maron (2013). “Attempting Normal (Enhanced Edition)”, p.134, Random House Group

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• They (fables) teach us that human beings learn and absorb ideas and concepts through narrative, through stories, not through lessons or theoretical speeches.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Ideas, Stories, Lessons

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• My Sunday school teachers had turned Bible narrative into children's fables. They talked about Noah and the ark because the story had animals in it. They failed to mention that this was when God massacred all of humanity.

  Donald Miller

  Teacher, Children, School

  Donald Miller (2007). “Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God”, p.21, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• … it wasn’t pretend, I wasn’t in a fairytale or a fable. I shut my eyes and absorbed the silent whoomp that always accompanies this revelation. It’s the sound of the real world, gigantic and impossible, replacing the smaller version of reality that I wear like a bonnet, clutched tightly under my chin.

  Miranda July

  Real, Eye, Sound

  Miranda July (2011). “It Chooses You”, p.14, Canongate Books

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• The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. 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

  Mistake, Ignorance, Errors

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

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• Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing.

  John Cheever

  Beautiful, Country, Believe

  John Cheever, Blake Bailey (2009). “John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings”

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• The story of Terisa and Geraden began very much like a fable. She was a princess in a high tower. He was a hero come to rescue her. She was the only daughter of wealth and power. He was the seventh son of the lord of the seventh Care. She was beautiful from the auburn hair that crowned her head to the tips of her white toes. He was handsome and courageous. She was held prisoner by enchantment. He was a fearless breaker of enchantments. As in all the fables, they were made for each other.

  Stephen R. Donaldson

  Beautiful, Daughter, Princess

  Stephen R. Donaldson (2013). “The Mirror of Her Dreams”, p.6, Del Rey

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• All the fairy tales of Aladdin, or the invisible Gyges, or the talisman that opens kings' palaces, or the enchanted halls underground or in the sea, are only fictions to indicated the one miracle of intellectual enlargement.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Kings, Sea, Miracle

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1883). “Emerson's Complete Works”

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• One of the oldest mythological fables tells of Mercury playing at dice with Selene and winning from her the five days of the epact (thus totaling the 365 days of the year and harmonizing the lunar and solar calendars).

  Richard Arnold Epstein

  Winning, Years, Calendars

  "The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic". Book by Richard Arnold Epstein, 1977.

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• If the literary category of 'mordant fable' exists at all, it may be because Brock Clarke invented it. The Happiest People in the World is everything we fans have come to love from a Clarke novel: playful and deliriously skewed, and somehow balancing between genuinely great-hearted and gloriously weird.

  Lauren Groff

  People, Fans, World

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• Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.

  Anthony Doerr

  Beautiful, Mean, Hands

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• Poetical taste is the only magician whose wand is not broken. No hand, except its own, can dissolve the fabric of beauty in which it dwells. Genii, unknown to Arabian fable, wait at the portal. Whatever is most precious from the loom or the mine of fancy is poured at its feet. Love, purified by contemplation, visits and cheers it; unseen musicians are heard in the dark; it is Psyche in the palace of Cupid.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Cheer, Dark, Hands

  Robert Aris Willmott (1866). “Pleasures, Objects, and Advantages of Literature”, p.92

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• Poetry being an attempt to express, not the common sense, - as the avoirdupois of the hero, or his structure in feet and inches, - but the beauty and soul in his aspect . . . runs into fable, personifies every fact. . . .

  Marsilio Ficino

  Beauty, Running, Hero

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• That's the problem with them fables, they're putting animals together that wouldn't meet. I don't know where a scorpion is knockin' around with a frog.

  Karl Pilkington

  Animal, Together, Scorpions

  "The Ricky Gervais Show" podcast (Season 3, Episode 2), 2006.

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• I have come to know that adversity really means the things in life that challenge us and cause us to work with devotion and courage to overcome. I once stood on a street in Trondheim, Norway, looking up at a statue of a Viking. There came to my mind at that time a fable of the Norsemen that when a man won a victory over another, the strength of the conquered went over into his veins. Therefore, in this sense adversity is good, for it produces in us a source of strength as we learn to conquer our weaknesses.

  Alvin R. Dyer

  Life, Mean, Adversity

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