"Fable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of clear colour: the little girls working by the luminous window with the muslin curtains and the hanging pot of greenstuff; the stiff-backed woman moving about with plates and dishes in her hands; the invalid wheezing on the little red calico sofa. The past was still reality, and the present a fable. It didn't seem true: lying with a man who was still strange to her; rising when she pleased; getting even her meals when she pleased. She could not realize the fact that she had left for ever her quiet home in the Potteries, and was travelling about ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... time in inquiring after that which is past and gone so many ages since, like one that shoots away an arrow to find out another that was lost before. He fetches things out of dust and ruins, like the fable of the chemical plant raised out of its own ashes. He values one old invention, that is lost and never to be recovered, before all the new ones in the world, though never so useful. The whole business of his life is the same with his ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... The fable of the Quivira, the golden city marked now by the ruins of the Piro pueblo of Tabiri, south of the salt-deposits of the Manzano, is still potent in Arizona and New Mexico to lure the treasure-seeker. Three hundred and fifty years ago it inspired a march across the plains ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... blame him?" asked Thad. "Makes me think of the old fable, when the lion and the donkey went hunting together. The lion took up his station at the mouth of the cave where some goats had hidden, while the donkey went in; and made all sorts of terrible noises, braying. So the ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... Ballads. The event narrated is a legend of the house of Cassilis (Kennedy), but is wholly unhistorical. "Sir John Faa," in the fable, is aided by Gypsies, but, apparently, is not one of the Earls of Egypt, on whom Mr. Crockett's novel, The Raiders, may be consulted. The ballad was first printed, as far as is known, ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... and military service. A large part of them left the city, and crossed the Anio to a mountain (Mons Sacer) near by. The Senate sent MENENIUS AGRIPPA to treat with them. By his exertions (Footnote: Menenius is said to have related for them the famous fable of the belly and members.) the people were induced to return to the city, and for the first time were allowed to have officers chosen from their own ranks to represent their interests. These officers were called ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... (I do not mean to rely too much on prayer, and the Divine Blessing, for that is impossible; but) we sometimes forget that we shall please Him best, and get most from Him, when, according to the Fable, we "put our shoulder to the wheel," when we use what we have by nature to the utmost, at the same time that we look out for what is beyond nature in the confidence of faith and hope. However, we are sometimes tempted ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... Britain, &c." The most ancient edition is that of 1528. The writers of these Gothic fables, lest they should be considered as mere triflers, pretended to an allegorical meaning concealed under the texture of their fable. From the following adventure we learn the power of beauty in making ten days appear as yesterday! Alexander the Great in search of Perceforest, parts with his knights in an enchanted wood, and each vows they ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... we might have seen abundantly in the gardens of the Thuilleries, and that of Luxembourgh at Paris, where they usually sow themselves, and come up very thick; and so do they in many places of our country, tho' so seldom taken notice of, as that it is esteemed a fable, by the less observant and ignorant vulgar; let it therefore be tried in season, by turning and raking some fine earth, often refreshed, under some amply spreading tree, or to raise them of their seeds (being well dried a day or two before) sprinkled on beds prepar'd of good loamy fresh earth, ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... treat it so," replied the King. "Oh, yes—break your sticks one at a time as the wise man did in the fable!" ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... oscura is accompanied by a sudden relief and buoyancy of spirit which perceptibly heightens the interest of the old-world city, once isolated by the woodland fastness of Nature, and belonging to an ageless past, surrounding the authentic origin of Djokjacarta with thick clouds of fable and myth. The modern name is derived from Arjudja, a city recorded in Java's ancient annals as being established by Rama, the incarnate Sun-God. Na-yud-ja, the first king of this Divinely-founded capital, also memorialises in his name the place which became the nucleus of the ancient Hindu empire. ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... the wild gorge, sleeps an enchanted Moor in armour, on an enchanted steed, guarding hidden treasure, or waiting for the magic word which will set him free to fight for his banished rulers. And yet, here was I entering this ancient citadel mighty in history and fable, in an ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... as its name implies.7 The origin of the Peruvian empire, like the origin of all nations, except the very few which, like our own, have had the good fortune to date from a civilized period and people, is lost in the mists of fable, which, in fact, have settled as darkly round its history as round that of any nation, ancient or modern, in the Old World. According to the tradition most familiar to the European scholar, the time was, when the ancient races of the continent were all plunged ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... classic fable to her little sister, while Mrs. Halfpenny explained that this came of Christian folk setting up heathen idols in their houses as 'twas a shame for decent folk to look at, let alone puir bairnies; while Jasper and Gillian gasped in ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... book, in which, whenever the train stopped, Kate wrote with all her might. For Kate had a desire to convince Sylvia Joanna that one was much happier without being a countess, and she thought this could be done very touchingly and poetically by a fable in verse; so she thought she had a very good idea by changing the old daisy that pined for transplantation and found it very unpleasant, into ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... way, had little more than a child's knowledge of the honey-bee. There is little fact and much fable in his fourth Georgic. If he had ever kept bees himself, or even visited an apiary, it is hard to see how he could have believed that the bee in its flight abroad carried a gravel ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... live alone and faithful. Five years ago he might have said to himself, "Irene or no one!" and have said it with the honesty of youth, of inexperience. No such enthusiasm was possible to him now. For the thing which is common in fable is all but unknown in life: a man, capable of loving ardently, who for the sake of one woman, beyond his hope, sacrifices love altogether. Piers Otway, who read much verse, had not neglected his Browning. He knew the transcendent mood of Browning's ideal lover—the beatific dream of ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... perfection of his technique. Artist he is, but more: a vigorous modern mind with a definite and enheartening view of things, a philosophy at once broad and convincing. He is a psychologist intensely interested in the great questions—which, of course, means the moral questions. Read the quaint Fable in which two of the characters in "Treasure Island" hold converse upon themselves, the story in which they participate and the author who made them. It is as if Stevenson stood aside a moment from the proper objectivity ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... be friendship never parted, But among the evil-hearted; Time's sure step drag, soon or later, To his judgment, such a Traitor; Lady Lukshmi, of her grace, Grant good fortune to this place; And you, Royal boys! and boys of times to be In this fair fable-garden wander free.' ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... his visit to the gardens on the evening of a balloon ascent, "and thus I witnessed the most wonderful sight I ever saw—a sight which a hundred millions of people in India consider to be a Feringhi fiction, an incredible fable; for though a Frenchman made an ascent at Lucknow some years ago, nobody believes it who did not see it, and many even who were present, believed that their senses had been beguiled by magic.... A car in the shape of a howdah was swung by ropes beneath ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... had reached his height, played only his own music; he played divinely and incomprehensibly; next to his passion for music was his greed for gold. These three facts sum up all we really know about the master—the rest fades off into mist—mystery, fable and legend. We do know, however, that he composed several pieces of music so difficult that he could not play them himself, and of course no one else can. Imagination can always outrun performance. Paganini had no close friends; no confidants: he never mingled ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... that it is homage offered to Life," said the other slowly. "Life under four aspects—Maternity corresponds to Christmas and the Christian fable; it is the feast of home, love, faithfulness. Life itself is approached in spring, teeming, young, passionate. Sustenance in midsummer, abundance, comfort, plenty, and the rest, corresponding somewhat to the Catholic Corpus Christi; and Paternity, ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... look at it, and found that his hard cash had changed to withered leaves. Precisely such a transformation had overtaken that eight thousand pounds, at the moment when it had fallen from the hands of a man who might have made an honest use of it. The fable was, and was not, true, so far as he remembered, and his fancy dwelt curiously about the history. There was no possibility of turning back the withered leaves to gold, and making them jingle and glitter ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... is gone with the dawn. They are the shadows of our childishness, and they show that we have a long journey before us; and they gain their strength from the fact that we gather them together out of the future like the bundle of sticks in the fable, when we shall have the strength to snap them singly ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... fable lovers feel of anguish and despite, I in myself comprise, and so my strength is crushed outright; And if thou seekst a watering-place, see, from my streaming eyes, Rivers of tears for those who thirst run ever day and night. ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... a daughter of the Gods, with a miraculous birth and upbringing. As she has decreed it a sacrilege to question this parentage, and has ordered to be burnt all those that seem to recollect her more earthly origin, the fable passes current for truth. You see the faith I put in you, Deucalion, by telling you what ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... assisted by careful cultivation. Narrow indeed is the boundary which divides unfeminine flippancy from the graceful nonsense which good authority and our own feelings pronounce to be "exquisite."[85] The unsuccessful attempt at its imitation always reminds me of Pilpay's fable of the Donkey and the Lapdog:—The poor donkey, who had been going on very usefully in its own drudging way, began to envy the lap-dog the caresses it received, and fancied that it would receive the same if it jumped upon its master as the lap-dog did: how awkwardly and unnaturally its attempts ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... "The tale of Hemetes the Heremite, pronounced before the Queene's Maiestie," which Warton, who clearly never saw the book, calls the "Fable of Hermes." In fact, it is, with a few verbal changes, the tale of Hemetes, which George Gascoigne presented, in Latin, Italian, French, and English, to Queen Elizabeth, and of which the MS., with the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... good reasons hostile to Russia. An abundant cheap supply, firstly, of English and French books, in English and French, but in the Russian character, by means of which Russians may rapidly learn French and English—for it is quite a fable that these languages are known and used in Russia below the level of the court and aristocracy—and, secondly, of Russian books in the Latin (or some easy phonetic development of the Latin) type, will do more to facilitate interchange and intercourse between Russia ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... not other young women at the prince's ball as beautiful as Cinderella, and other gowns, perhaps, as marvelous as the one provided by the fairy godmother. The godmother's greatest gift, I should say, though the fable lays little stress on it, was a capacity for unalloyed delight. No other young girl, beautiful as she may have been, if she were accustomed to driving to balls in coaches and having princes ask her to dance with them, could possibly ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... said Captain Rik firmly. "They talk a deal of stuff about it, more than nine-tenths of which is lies—pure fable. I don't believe in electricity; more than that, I don't believe in steam. Batteries and ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... Messrs. Constable, and had, in those booksellers' phrase, "considerable success." It has never, however, been placed on a level with Triermain; and though it contains many vigorous pictures, and splendid verses, and here and there some happy humor, the confusion and harsh transitions {p.136} of the fable, and the dim rudeness of character and manners, seem sufficient to account for this inferiority in public favor. It is not surprising that the author should have redoubled his aversion to the notion of any more serious performances in verse. He had seized on an instrument of wider ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... and the idea of successive periods, each with its own creation. We ascertain on examination; however, that in the superstition they are not scientific ideas at all, but mere chance guesses, set, like those of Brahminism, in a farago of wild and monstrous fable. Each of the many systems of which the universe is composed consists, say the Buddhists, of three worlds of a circular form, joined together at the edges, so that there intervenes between them an angular interspace, which constitutes their common hell; and ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... Jack the Giant-Queller, (not Killer, as usually erroneously written and pronounced.—See my essay on the true history of this worthy, where real facts have in a peculiar degree been obscured by fable.) In short, all in the village were under the necessity of doing something which they would rather have left undone, excepting Captain Doolittle, who walked every morning in the open street, which formed the high mall of our village, in a blue coat with a red neck, and played at whist the ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... the Word Fib.—Can any of your readers suggest a proper derivation of this word? Old Bailey, to whom a reference would occasionally save many doubts and inquiries, connects it with "fable." Johnson says nothing as to the etymology, but explains it as "a cant word among children;" while, at the same time, he inserts it on the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 70, March 1, 1851 • Various
... however, should fall to the person by whom the tale is told,[19] or whether any part belongs to the authority alleged for it, is unfortunately not quite clear. There would hardly have been a doubt, if the fable had been confined to the other side of the Atlantic; but it has been reproduced and widely circulated on this side also; and the distinguished artist whom it calumniates by attributing the invention to him has been left undefended from its slander. Dickens's ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... her melancholy meditations cheered, and her torpid blood warmed, and her shoulders lightened of at least twenty ponderous years, by a draught from the true Fountain of Youth, in a case-bottle. It is strange that men should deem that fount a fable when its liquor fills more bottles than the Congress-water! Sip it again, good nurse, and see whether a second draught will not take off another score of years, and perhaps ten more, and show us, in your high-backed chair, the blooming damsel who plighted ...
— Edward Fane's Rosebud (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that they have become fables. "Not all lies, nor all true, all foolishness, nor all sense; so much have the storytellers told, and so much have the makers of fables fabled to embellish their stories that they have made all seem fable." [4] He omits the prophecies of Merlin from his narrative, because he does not understand them. "I am not willing to translate his book, because I do not know how to interpret it. I would say nothing that ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... the history of the being of half the earth in one of those green oval leaves—the things that the sun and the rivers have made out of dry ground. Daphne—daughter of Enipeus, and beloved by the Sun,—that fable gives you at once the two great facts about vegetation. Where warmth is, and moisture—there, also, the leaf. Where no warmth—there is no leaf; where there ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... "In realising the fable of the boys and the frogs with the poor old Dominie, forgetting that what may be sport to ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... paragraph! We have nothing for it but to submit. Society, the despot, has given his imperial decree. We may think the statue had been seen to greater advantage without the tin drapery; we may plead that the moral were better might we recite the whole fable. Away with him—not a word! I never saw the pianofortes in the United States with the frilled muslin trousers on their legs; but, depend on it, the muslin covered some of the notes as well as the mahogany, muffled the music, and ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... what is't you read— Romance or fairy fable? Or is it some historic page Of kings and crowns unstable?' The young boy gave an upward glance— 'It is the ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... to act the part of the pedagogue in the fable who preaches to people when his sermon can no longer be of any possible use, but I cannot help telling you that it is a great imprudence on your part to allow yourself to be caught in this way by the winter in England. What you now suffer from is only a trifling malady, ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... seemed to grow enormous bats' wings, which spread out until they obscured the whole sky. The ghostly figure resembled a wild creature of fable, born of the weird fancy of a Dore, or an avenging angel of the Apocalypse. Then the rider shrank together again and seemed to be bouncing up and down on the back of his horse like ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... 'that this yarn about your pearl is nothing but a damn silly fable that's been going the round in Marseilles. I don't know where it came from, or what sort of demented rotter invented it; I had it from a Johnnie in the Mediterranean Squadron, and you can have a copy of his letter if you ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... I have read something very like this stuff and nonsense about jackasses and foxes before. That wolf in sheep's clothing?—do I not know him? That fox discoursing with the crow?—have I not previously heard of him? Yes, in Lafontaine's fables: let us get the Dictionary and the Fable and the Biographie Universelle, article Lafontaine, and ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... The epithet schneidermassig (tailor-like) betokens an otherwise unapproachable degree of pusillanimity; we introduce a Tailor's-Melancholy, more opprobrious than any Leprosy, into our Books of Medicine; and fable I know not what of his generating it by living on Cabbage. Why should I speak of Hans Sachs (himself a Shoemaker, or kind of Leather-Tailor), with his Schneider mit dem Panier? Why of Shakspeare, in his Taming of the Shrew, and elsewhere? ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... the afternoon, Brigitte began early in the morning of the next day what Thuillier called her rampage, a popular term which expresses that turbulent, nagging, irritating activity which La Fontaine has described so well in his fable of "The Old Woman and her Servants." Brigitte declared that if you didn't take time by the forelock no one would be ready. She prevented Thuillier from going to his office, insisting that if he once got off she never should see him again; ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... the inconsistency of the human mind, that, having built his castle with so little view to durability, Walpole entailed the perishable possession with a degree of strictness, which would have been more fitting for a baronial estate. And that, too, after having written a fable entitled "The Entail," in consequence, of some one having asked him whether he did not intend to entail Strawberry Hill, and in ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... a "receipt to make an epic poem," and after giving directions for the "fable," the "manners," and the "machines," he comes ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... sea-serpent was a basking shark on a stem of sea-weed. A committee of the French Academy of Sciences, with Lavoisier at its head, after a grave investigation, pronounced the alleged fall of aerolites to be a superstitious fable."[181] ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... garlands of Mario de' Fiori; the chamber of Heliodorus, where Raphael has succeeded in making the dull walls throb and palpitate with life; and the apartments of the Borgias, where the great fantasia of Penturicchio unfolds its marvellous web of history, fable, dreams, caprices and audacities; and the Galatea Room, through which is diffused an ineffable freshness, a perennial serenity of light and grace; and the room where the Hermaphrodite, that gentle monster, offspring of the loves of a nymph and a demi-god, extends his ambiguous form amidst the ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... Your sex's much-lov'd enemy; For other foes we are prepar'd, And Nature puts us on our guard: In that alone such charms are found, We court the dart, we nurse the hand; And this, my child, an Aesop's Fable Will prove much better than ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... People their own, without acknowledging the Piracy they are guilty of, or so much as paying the least Complement to the Authors of their Wisdom: No, Gentlemen and Ladies, I am not the Daw in the Fable, that would vaunt and strut in your Plumes. And besides, I know very well you might have me upon the Hank according to Law, and treat me as a Highwayman or Robber; for you might safely swear upon your Honours, that I had stole the whole Book ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. Part 1 • Samuel Johnson [AKA Hurlo Thrumbo]
... was the greatest man intellectually that Ori had ever met, so John L. Sullivan, the famous fighter, was the greatest man in that line of his time. The islanders, in common with other primitive peoples, admire physical perfection tremendously, and feats of strength are celebrated in fable, song, and story. To Ori there was nothing incongruous in placing John L. Sullivan, the famous prizefighter, and Robert Louis Stevenson, the noted writer—two great men—side ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... gentleman; he was, and ever would be, a farmer, and nothing more; and for all that, he thought a farmer—an honest, upright, English farmer—might have as correct ideas as to right and wrong as any gentleman." At this Mrs. Myles became very indignant; like the frog in the fable, she endeavoured to think herself an ox, and talked and looked magnificence itself, until at last she felt as if being her grand-children was enough to entitle Helen and Rose to sit before a queen. She talked of Edward,—his occupation, his barns, his cows, ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... during life. Should we, to whom the memory of their ancestors (I mean beyond Dardanus) has not come down, should we say that Dardanus while alive was a common peasant, and dead became noble? And this is not contradicted by the story that he was the son of Jupiter (for this is a fable, of which, in a philosophical discussion, we should take no heed); and yet if our opponent should wish to fall back on the fable, certainly that which is covered by the fable would ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... are the majority, can keep open all the markets, or at least sufficient ones for their objects, the cries of the tobacco-makers, who are the minority, and not at all in favor, will hardly be listened to. It is truly the fable of the monkey pulling the nuts out of the fire with the cat's paw; and it shows that G. Mason's proposition in the convention was wise, that on laws regulating commerce, two thirds of the votes should be requisite to pass them. However, it would have ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... language,—stories which are too short, as well as those which are too long, have this feature in their changed form. The change in a short story is applied oftenest where it becomes desirable to amplify a single anecdote, or perhaps a fable, which is told in very condensed form. Such an instance is the following anecdote of heroism, which in the original is quoted in one of F.W. Robertson's ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... more dependable than the sailing vessel. The Lightning clipper might run a hundred miles farther in twenty-four hours than ever a steamer had done, but she could not maintain this meteoric burst of speed. Upon the heaving surface of the Western Ocean there was enacted over again the fable of the hare ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... the open and die there, if need be! To live in this rat hole, breathing plague, is dying already! Caonabo is a fable! These people! Spaniards have but to ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... Brighton or Newport of the Roman. Here was the haunt of the sybarites, whose gay barks skimmed the shallow waters of the Lucrine lake; and not far off slumbered in its volcanic hollow that other lake, Avernus, renowned in legend and poetry, through whose caverns, fable had it, lay the entrance to the world of the dead. The whole country about was one city of stately villas, of cool groves, of bright gardens; a huge pleasure world, where freedom too often became license; ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... first of the guests to praise the wine and to say as he reclines next the host, 'How delicate your fare always is'; and taking up something from the table, 'Now, how excellent that is!'" And so on. Yes, we have heard it all over and over again in Modern Athens also. The Greek fable also of the fox and the crow and the piece of cheese is only another illustration of the truth that the God of truth and integrity never left Himself without a witness. Our own literature also is scattered full of the Flatterer and his too willing dupes. ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... porter at Valoroso's palace, having been turned by the Fairy Blackstick into a door knocker for his insolence, is restored to the sorrowing Servants' Hall exactly when his services are again required in the capacity of Mrs. Gruffanuffs husband. But in Miss Edgeworth's little fable there is no fairy agency. "Fairies were not much in her line," says Lady Ritchie, Thackeray's daughter, "but philanthropic manufacturers, liberal noblemen, and benevolent ladies in travelling carriages, do as well and appear ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... directions about their burial as we read here. We have omitted a silly tale of a one-footed man. In the middle ages, people believed that one-footed men lived in Africa; they thought Vineland was near Africa, so they brought the fable ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... like so many steers, and as easily stampeded. When the Atlin boom struck the camp, Foy lost five hundred men in as many minutes. Scores of graders dropped their tools and started off on a trot. The prospector who had told the fable had thrown his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the general direction. Nobody had thought to ask how far. Many forgot to let go; and Heney's picks and shovels, worth over a dollar apiece, went away with the stampeders. ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... had ended here, But both their Genii straight appear, Joy and amazement her did strike: Two twins she never saw so like. 'Twas taught by wise Pythagoras, One soul might through more bodies pass. Seeing such transmigration there, She thought it not a fable here. 70 Such a resemblance of all parts, Life, death, age, fortune, nature, arts; Then lights her torch at theirs, to tell, And show the world this parallel: Fix'd and contemplative their looks, Still turning over Nature's books; Their works chaste, moral and divine, Where profit and delight ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... Grecian history and even of Grecian fable. We are inspired by ancient poetry and eloquence, as well as by the bards and orators of modern times. Painting and sculpture are the equal admiration of every refined age. The virtue of patriotism has been illustrated by savage as well as civilized life. Thus every recorded ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... Yes;—I was always fighting him. What are you to do but to fight cruelty, and fight falsehood, and fight fraud and treachery,—when they come upon you and would overwhelm you but for fighting? You have not been fool enough to believe that fable about a duel? I did stand once, armed, and guarded my bedroom door from him, and told him that he should only enter it over my body. He went away to the tavern and I did not see him for a week afterwards. That was the duel. And they have told you ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... Of course I silently bowed assent; but while the officer who had spoken to me was giving similar instructions to other gentlemen, I own I felt a little nervous, lest, during the polite scramble in which I was about to engage, like the dog in the fable, grasping at the shadow of the second lady, I might lose the substance of the first, or vice versa. However, when the doors were thrown open, I very quickly, with a profound reverence, obtained my prize, and at once ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... fable of Aesop was directed My thought, by reason of the present quarrel, Where he has spoken of the ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... that touches very near the quick of life,—the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself at his return a stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his comrades ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... have undertaken, that it is almost a question, whether, if the dead of past ages could revive, they would be able to reconnoitre the events of their own times, as transmitted to us by ignorance and misrepresentation. All very ancient history, except that of the illuminated Jews, is a perfect fable. It was written by priests, or collected from their reports; and calculated solely to raise lofty ideas of the origin of each nation. Gods and demi-gods were the principal actors; and truth is seldom to be expected where the personages are supernatural. The Greek historians have ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... the musician; "yet let me say for myself, that I will not yield to the king of minstrels, Geoffrey Rudel, though the King of England hath given him four manors for one song. I would be willing to contend with him in romance, lay, or fable, were the judge to ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... of a woman so young and so lovely, Jacques Ferrand felt sometimes his mind wandering; a devouring imagery pursued him, waking or sleeping. The ancient fable of the Nessus' ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... Oh scenes surpassing fable, and yet true, Scenes of accomplished bliss! which who can see, Though but in distant prospect, and not feel His soul refreshed with foretaste of the joy? Rivers of gladness water all the earth, And clothe all climes with beauty; the reproach Of barrenness is past. The fruitful field Laughs ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... Reason. Our Pity is not to be extended in a wrong place. In short, The Disposition of the play is to be such that all the Characters have a proper Effect with us. Our Fear, Love, and Anger are to be exerted with Justice; and we are to learn from a just Fable how to behave our selves in earnest. Thus may we exercise our Souls by examining our reasonable Faculties, and try how we can love to extremity, and yet without a Fault; to be angry and sin not; to be just ...
— A Letter to A.H. Esq.; Concerning the Stage (1698) and The - Occasional Paper No. IX (1698) • Anonymous
... joint production was a farce, or rather play, in three acts, called "Jupiter," written in imitation of the burletta of Midas, whose popularity seems to have tempted into its wake a number of these musical parodies upon heathen fable. The amour of Jupiter with Major Amphitryon's wife, and Sir Richard Ixion's courtship of Juno, who substitutes Miss Peggy Nubilis in her place, form the subject of this ludicrous little drama, of which Halhed furnished the burlesque scenes,—while ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... that you are! He said nothing of himself. He was absorbed in my stories concerning you. I told him as pretty a fable as La Fontaine related of the Avare qui avait perdu son tresor! I said you were a beautiful chatelaine besieged by an army of lovers, but the knight errant Fortunatus had alone won your favor, and would receive your hand! The brave Colonel! I could see he winced at this. His steel ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... was called silagan, whose office it was, if they saw anyone clothed in white, to tear out his liver and eat it, thus causing his death. This, like the preceding, was in the island of Catanduanes. Let no one, moreover, consider this a fable; because, in Calavan, they tore out in this way through the anus all the intestines of a Spanish notary, who was buried in Calilaya by father Fray Juan ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... the terrible doubt of appearances, Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded, That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all, That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only, May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills, shining and flowing waters, The skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, may-be these are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions, and the real ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... they reembarked. They gathered, too, from the signs of their savage visitors, that the wonderful land of Cibola, with its seven cities and its untold riches, was distant but twenty days' journey by water. In truth, it was on the Gila, two thousand miles off, and its wealth a fable. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... did not cover the embarrassment with which he discovered that, if anything, he had made matters worse. Here was an instance of his incorrigible want of tact; much better to have offered no application of the fable at all, and to have turned the talk. He had told a simple truth, but with the result of appearing to glorify himself, and possibly at his friend's expense. Vexed beyond measure, he crushed his ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... induced to join us by your abhorrence of priestcraft and superstition,—you made a wide connection among all the enlightened reasoners who would emancipate the mind of man from the trammels of Church-born fable, and when the hour arrives in which it is safe to say, 'Delenda est Roma,' you know where to find the pens that are more victorious than swords against a Church and a Creed. You" (turning to the surgeon)—"you, Gaspard le ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... where lightning is the lover's boon, And honey oozing from an amber moon Illumines footing on forbidden wall; Where, 'stead of pursy jeweler's display, Parading peacocks brave the passer-by, And swans like angels in an azure sky Wing swift and silent on unchallenged way. No land of fable! Of the Hills I sing, Whose royal women tread with conscious grace The peace-filled gardens of a warrior race, Each maiden fit for wedlock with a king, And every Rajput son so royal born And conscious of his age-long heritage He looks askance at ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... the power of a single impression and a clear, quick getaway. She left him dazed by the fortune which heaped upon him literary classics in a dozen forms—fiction, essays, history, poetry, short stories, criticism, fable, and the like; she laughed at her own quick liking for the serious-minded, self-deprecatory, old-young man whose big innocent eyes displayed a soul enamoured by the spirited intelligence of an experienced and rather disillusioned ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... translation and imitation, modern writers adopted the old forms, and filled them with modern matter. The old mythology, when it was kept, was used allegorically and allusively. Common-sense, pointedly expressed, with some traditional ornament and fable, ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... Parable, and the Fable are all common and popular modes of conveying instruction. Each is distinguished by its own special characteristics. The Tale consists simply in the narration of a story either founded on facts, or created solely by the imagination, and not necessarily associated ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... a play," continued Triplet, "is the plot or fable. A gentleman of your experience can decide at once whether a plot or story is one to take ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... is an old favourite among the Ibans (Sea Dayaks) of the Batang Lupar, will serve to illustrate, with its many heterogeneous features, the myth-making faculty of this imitative and fun-loving people. It will be noticed that the story combines the characters of a creation-myth, an animal fable, ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... in little more than a year, although nine years were to elapse ere it saw the light. In 1758, he began the "Idler," which reached the 103d No., and was considered lighter and more agreeable than the "Rambler." He has seldom written anything so powerful as his fable of "The Vultures." In 1759, his mother died, at the age of ninety,—an event which deeply affected him. Soon after this, and to defray the expenses of her funeral, he wrote his brilliant tale of "Rasselas," in the evenings of a single week,—a ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... will not trow me, but hold it for fable to tell them the noblesse of his person and of his estate and of his court and of the great multitude of folk that he holds, natheles I shall say you a part of him and of his folk, after that I have seen the manner and the ordinance ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown
... thou mayst reade Ionas frutefully & not as a poetis fable/ but as an obligacon betwene God and thy soule/ as an ernist peny geuen [the] of God/ [that] he wil helpe [the] in time of nede/ if thou turne to him and as the word of god [the] only fode and life of thy soule/ this marke & note. First count Ionas the frend of god and a ...
— The prophete Ionas with an introduccion • William Tyndale
... the American girl is neither an affectation, nor a prejudiced fable, nor a piece of stupidity. The German woman, quoted by Mr. Bryce, found her American compeer furchtbar frei, but she had at once to add und furchtbar fromm. "The innocence of the American girl ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... leisure to devote themselves to promoting the welfare of their neighbours. In truth, the office of alderman is no sinecure. He is not merely a very stout gentleman, wearing a blue gown, and guzzling enormous quantities of turtle-soup. That caricature is of a piece with the old fable of the lean Frenchman, starving upon frogs, and capable only of dancing and grimacing. An alderman of the City of London has most onerous duties to discharge, for which he expects no other remuneration than the approval of ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen
... struggles of the two favourite heroes against the cruel princes of Xibalba, there may be reminiscences of historical events; but it would be perfectly hopeless to attempt to extricate these from the mass of fable by which they are surrounded. The chief interest of the American tale consists in the points of similarity which it exhibits with the tales of the Old World. We shall mention two only—the repeated resuscitation of the chief heroes, who, even when burnt and ground to powder and ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... "Fable indeed!" was the exclamation that greeted him on two sides, on the one from her ladyship, on the other from the neat little maid, the latter crying out how much she had been frightened; that she was still all of a tremble; the former turned back her sleeve ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... Culdee" of whom we know so little did not survive, any more than did the Celtic kings, her influence and the transformation she effected. Her life and legend formed the stepping-stone for Scotland into authentic history as into a consolidated and independent existence. The veil of fable and uncertainty cleared away before the mild shining of her name and story. Like Edinburgh coming suddenly into sight, as in some old and primitive picture, high upon its rock, with the slope of the Castle Hill on one side and the precipices round, and the ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... numerous invitations to dinners and theater parties. After these mendacious statements he would wend a gloomy way homeward to his Pine Street boarding-house, and there spend the evening pretending to read, and cursing the fate which had ever brought him within the light of Genevieve's beaux yeux. The fable of being the family friend was quite shattered. Faraday ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... expression of the thoughts, the loves, the hopes, and the aspirations which were our own as well as theirs, these writers of our South are living still and will live through the long procession of the years. In the garden of our lives they planted the flowers of poesy, of fable, and of romance. With the changes of the years those flowers may have passed into the realm of the old-fashioned, like the blossoms in Grandmother's garden, but are there any sweeter or more royally ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... does a mere ascription of sex to what is literally of no sex, necessarily imply a personification; for there may be sex without personality, as we see in brute animals. Hence the gender of a brute animal personified in a fable, may be taken literally as before; and the gender which is figuratively ascribed to the sun, the moon, or a ship, is merely metaphorical. In the following sentence, nature is animated and made feminine by a metaphor, while a lifeless object bearing the name of ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the order and awe of lower and loftier animal life, first clearly taught in the myth of Chiron, and in his bringing up of Jason, AEsculapius, and Achilles, but most perfectly by Homer, in the fable of the horses of Achilles, and the part assigned to them, in relation to the death of his friend, and in prophecy of his own. There is, perhaps, in all the "Iliad," nothing more deep in significance—there is nothing in all literature more perfect in human tenderness, ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... having usurped all the powers of government, and having begun to pocket the public money at a great rate, the people grew discontented. They began to think that they had done wrong in driving King James away. In a pretty little fable-book, there is a fable which says that the frogs, who had a log of wood for king, prayed to Jupiter to send them something more active. He sent them a stork, or heron, which gobbled them up alive by scores! The people of England found in the Boroughmongers what the poor frogs found ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... thickness. A more brilliant scene perhaps never presented itself to the human eye, nor was it easy for us to divest ourselves of the idea that we actually beheld one of the fairy scenes depicted in Eastern fable. The light of the torches rendered it ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... time, the Presidential nomination impending, Mr. Madison had made up his mind what to do. He was not exactly a wolf; neither was Great Britain a lamb; but the argument he used was the argument of the fable. Instead of advising—Bassano having declared the decrees still in force—a repeal of the non-importation act, as Great Britain claimed was in justice and comity her due, he recommended a war measure. ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... you are having! You will return to the Yard with an expanded brain. When you buy a new hat you will be astounded and gratified. But beware of the fate of the frog in the fable. He inflated himself until he emulated the size ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... often, as the mere consequence of the transition from wood to stone, (a figure carved out of one wooden log must have necessarily its feet near each other, and hands at its sides,) these literal changes are as nothing, in the Greek fable, compared to the bestowing of apparent life. The figures of monstrous gods on Indian temples have their legs separate enough; but they are infinitely more dead than the rude figures at Branchidae sitting with their hands on their knees. ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... of this fable, he expresses no opinion as to the merits of the controversy between the Red-faced Man and the Hare that, without search on his own part, presented itself to his mind in so odd a fashion. It is one on which ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... side of the matter. A mother disappointed in her children must be a desperately unhappy woman. She has nothing left; for has she not resigned everything for them? But is sacrifice for ever to follow on sacrifice? Is life to go rolling after life, like the cheeses that the idiot in the fable sent running downhill, the one to ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird |
