"Fable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... here; it was only the Thebans who were called Spartoi, from speiro, to sow, because of the fable of the dragon's teeth sown by Cadmus; the Athenians, who claimed to be earthborn, not called ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... the earth appears Harivarsha with the northern Kurus. The region of Hari or Vishnu belongs to the system of mythical geography; but the case is different with the Uttara Kurus. Here there is a real basis of geographical fact; of which fable has only taken advantage, without creating it. The Uttara Kurus were formerly quite independent of the mythical system of dvipas, though they were included in it at an early date." Again the same writer says at p. 65: "That the conception ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... floors, and empty departmental waste baskets, from nearness of contact and a daily perusal of your truly great, come at last to look upon themselves as beings of tremendous importance—and all after the self-gratulatory example of the thoughtful fly on the chariot wheel in the fable. The least of them beholds a picture of the government in every looking-glass into which ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... sources, even if productive; but the imaginations of speculators are ever in the advance, and their conjectures are immediately converted into facts. Lying reports now flew from mouth to month, of sure avenues to fortune suddenly thrown open. The more extravagant the fable, the more readily was it believed. To doubt was to awaken anger, or incur ridicule. In a time of public infatuation, it requires no small exercise of courage to doubt a ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... appear to extend beyond the period of the flood, and from these the "dark idolater of chance," who would rejoice to prove that "Book of Books" a splendid fable, draws his deductions. But how he fails. The learned men of China, those held in the greatest repute amongst a people where such a reputation is not easily obtained, themselves admit, that the history of their empire in its infancy, is, for the most part, ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... Grecian fable, Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a fountain, and, having pined away because he could not kiss it, was changed into the flower which bears his name.—Ovid, Metamorphoses, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... more perfectly render the fine points required in giving animals that serio-comic and half-human expression which was so intensely ridiculous and yet admirable in the studies of the groups illustrating the fable of "Reinecke the Fox," which were in the Wurtemburgh Court, class XXX. and were executed by H. Ploucquet, of Stuttgart. These groups, or similar ones, are now to be seen in the ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... the greatest excellence of the short story. Mr. Dooley of the Archey Road is essentially a wholesome and wide-poised humorous philosopher, and the author of Fables in Slang is chiefly a satirist, whether in fable, ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... and foundries loom up as vague shadow creations. From fifty chimney mouths thick black smoke curls unceasingly; now soaring to a considerable height, now driven down to earth by fitful gusts of wind. In their sinuous course these smoke-clouds resemble the genii of fable, who spread over the ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... of common day on the hill above Slabsides, with the waters of the Hudson glistening below, and the trees rustling in the wind all about us, that is quite another matter. It sounds like a dream or a fable. Many of the processes that have made our globe what we see it have been so slow and on such a scale that they are quite beyond our horizon—beyond the reach of our mental apprehension. The mind has to approach them slowly and tentatively, and become familiar with the idea of them, before it can ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... that the opinion as to the widespread existence of frigidity among women is a fable. (Kossmann, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... submit with one accord. When Mansoul trampled upon things divine, And wallowed in filth as doth a swine; When she betook herself unto her arms, Fought her Emmanuel, despis'd his charms; Then I was there, and did rejoice to see Diabolus and Mansoul so agree. Let no men, then, count me a fable-maker, Nor make my name or credit a partaker Of their derision: what is here in view, Of mine own knowledge, I dare say is true. I saw the Prince's armed men come down By troops, by thousands, to besiege ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... religion is founded? and have they spent all the time they devoted to writing for the salvation of the souls of men, in fooling with the Old Testament in the manner you aver? 'Tis false! 'Tis monstrous! Either your hypothesis is a fable, or Christianity, itself is like the ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... agent had been received there upon this matter, which was regarded at the prefecture as a fable. The invention of this fable was attributed to ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... solving. Perhaps Wilbur had disappeared merely to play a practical jest on her; but that supposition was too childish to be retained an instant. Perhaps—perhaps Pierre himself had discovered her, but having vowed never to see her again, he cared for her like the invisible hands in the old Greek fable. ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... not wonder that the pagans, dissatisfied with their gods, made complaints against Prometheus and Epimetheus for having forged so weak an animal as man. Nor do I wonder that they acclaimed the fable of old Silenus, foster-father of Bacchus, who was seized by King Midas, and as the price of his deliverance taught him that ostensibly fine maxim that the first and the greatest of goods was not to be born, and the second, to depart from this life with dispatch (Cic., Tuscul., lib. 1). Plato ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... religious, so surely 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 confound ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "These two sons of Anak flourished in romantic fable. The first is well known to the admirers of Ariosto by the name of Ferrau. He was an antagonist of Orlando, and was at length slain by him in single combat.... Ascapart, or Ascabart, makes a very material figure in the History of Bevis of Hampton, by whom ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... the doctor with a smile, "did ever you hear the fable of the mountain and the mouse? You'll excuse me, I dare say, but you remind me of that fable. When you came in here, I'll stake my wig, you ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... clever. If I am offended or injured I bear it quite patiently until the man injuring me meets with some misfortune. Then I remember, and take my revenge. I return the injury sevenfold, as Ivan Petrovitch Ptitsin says. (Of course he never does so himself.) Excellency, no doubt you recollect Kryloff's fable, 'The Lion and the Ass'? Well now, that's you and I. That fable was written precisely ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... on! they say thou art Earth's satellite; yet when I gaze on thee my thoughts are not of thy suzerain. They teach us that thy power is a fable, and that thy divinity is a dream. Oh, thou bright Queen! I will be no traitor to thy sweet authority; and verily, I will not believe that thy influence o'er our hearts is, at this moment, less potent than when ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... unpractical part of the thing that is really the practical. The chief difference between men and the animals is that all men are artists; though the overwhelming majority of us are bad artists. As the old fable truly says, lions do not make statues; even the cunning of the fox can go no further than the accomplishment of leaving an exact model of the vulpine paw: and even that is an accomplishment which he wishes he hadn't got. There are Chryselephantine statues, but no purely ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... from was inspired by the performance of the great Pasta in Simone Mayer's weak musical setting of the fable of the Colchian sorceress, which crowded the opera-houses of Europe. The life of the French classical tragedy, too, was powerfully assisted by Rachel. Though the poem on which Cherubini worked was unworthy of his genius, it could not ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... horrible accident, but it must be admitted it was De Guiche's own fault. How could he possibly have gone to hunt such an animal merely armed with pistols; he must have forgotten the fable of Adonis?" ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... for unemployment this scheme was on a par with the method of the tailor in the fable who thought to lengthen his cloth by cutting a piece off one end and sewing it on to the other; but there was one thing about it that recommended it to the Vicar—it was self-supporting. He found that there would be no ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... for another appointment. He was canvassing the State, with a view to a final rally of its resources, preparatory to his last great effort—to scotch the serpent of the North, which finally, however, wound its insidious folds around the heart of brotherly affection, stifling it, as the snakes of fable were sent to do the ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... with which it was strewn. "You'll never get your pennyworth here. The scheme these gentry have afoot is just a Yazoo business. If these lands exist, they're only a hunting-ground of swamp, Indians, and buffalo. The survey is paper, the cleared fields a fable, the town Manoa, the scheme a bubble, the purchasers fools, and the sellers knaves,—and there's your legal opinion in ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... you came with your tapping; You are vastly mistaken If you think I've forsaken My official position Because no physician Could give me a cranium Like a pot of geranium. And these are my orders— No one passes these borders Unless he is able, In song, rhyme, or fable, The real, true intention ...
— All the Way to Fairyland - Fairy Stories • Evelyn Sharp
... a regular examination of the tragedy before us, in which I shall treat separately of the Fable, the Moral, the Characters, the Sentiments, and the Diction. And first ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... be disingenuously dispersed in every shape that is likely to allure, surprise, or beguile the imagination—in a fable, a tale, a novel, a poem, in books of travels, of philosophy, of natural history, as Mr Paley has well observed—I hope it is fair in me thus to meet such poison with an unexpected antidote, which I cannot doubt will be ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... 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
... money, went one day to 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 again as only one's own ready ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... saying in the services, and elsewhere, that greater privileges grow out of larger responsibilities, and that the latter justifies the former. This is part truth and part fable. ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... predominance; Since likewise for the stricken heart of Love This visible nature, and this common world, 115 Is all too narrow: yea, a deeper import Lurks in the legend told my infant years Than lies upon that truth, we live to learn. For fable is Love's world, his home, his birth-place; Delightedly dwells he 'mong fays and talismans, 120 And spirits; and delightedly believes Divinities, being himself divine. The intelligible forms of ancient poets, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... commonly supply. The plan of the whole work is very imperfectly shown by the third part. The duration of an unfinished action cannot be known. Of characters, either not yet introduced, or shown but upon few occasions, the full extent and the nice discriminations cannot be ascertained. The fable is plainly implex, formed rather from the Odyssey than the Iliad; and many artifices of diversification are employed, with the skill of a man acquainted with the best models. The past is recalled by narration, and the future anticipated ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... the rose. I can assure you that since they have been here they have not had the slightest indisposition. I must relate to you a very pretty response on the part of Oui Oui. The Abbe Bertrand caused him to read a fable where there was a question about metamorphosis. Being called to explain the word, he ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... next to —— ' (the other.) 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 confiding ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... education based on "reality," as in this method we would adopt, is too arid, and tends to dry up the founts of spiritual life. Such reasoning, however, will not be accepted by religious persons. They know well that faith and fable are "as the poles apart," since fable is in itself a thing without faith, and faith is the very sentiment of truth, which should accompany man even unto death. Religion is not a product of fantastic imagination, it is the greatest of realities, the one truth to the religious ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... And all that is now to be at an end? And the DISENCHANTMENT of woman is in progress? The tediousness of woman is slowly evolving? Oh Europe! Europe! We know the horned animal which was always most attractive to thee, from which danger is ever again threatening thee! Thy old fable might once more become "history"—an immense stupidity might once again overmaster thee and carry thee away! And no God concealed beneath it—no! only an "idea," a ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... have kept hers if she had profited by God's mercy, if she had done in time, done years ago, what was imperatively ordered her; if she hadn't in fine been cursed with the loveliness that was to make her behaviour a thing of fable. She may keep them still if she'll sacrifice—and after all so little—that purely superficial charm. She must do as you've done; she must wear, dear lady, what ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... at that important juncture was marked with characters so peculiar, that, realizing the fairest fable of antiquity, its parallel could scarcely be found in the authentic ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... my little fable: He that runs may read. Most can raise the flowers now, For all have ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... An Egyptian fable tells of two brothers. The younger, Bata, was falsely accused by his sister-in-law (as was Joseph by Potiphar's wife). His brother Inpw (Anepu) consequently pursued him. The sun god made a mighty flood that separated the pursuer from the pursued. Bata ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... large as those of ordinary men, have been found. Probably the skulls of Lauang, which are pressed out in breadth, and covered with a thick crust of calcareous sinter, the gigantic skulls (skulls of giants) have given rise to the fable of the giants' footsteps. ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... must import a wooden leg." At Dunsinnane the old prejudice broke out. "Sir," said he to Boswell, "Macbeth was an idiot; he ought to have known that every wood in Scotland might be carried in a man's hand. The Scotch, Sir, are like the frogs in the fable: if they had a log, they would make a king of it." We will quote here a stanza which contains quite a serious application of the pun; and for Hood's purpose no other word could so happily or so pungently express his meaning. The poem is an ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... represent it to the senses can ever succeed. We can bear—at least we often have to bear—that a man should seem an ass to the mind's eye; but that he should seem such to the eye of the body is rather too much, save as it is done in those fable-pictures which have long been among the playthings of the nursery. So a child, for instance, takes great pleasure in fancying the stick he is riding to be a horse, when he would be frightened out of his wits, were the stick to quicken and expand into an actual horse. In like manner we often ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... stiletto, so artfully that I was taken in. She deceived an enemy more cunning than myself, the Pompilus, who inspected her very closely and took her for a corpse unworthy of her dagger. Perhaps the simple creature, like the Bear in the fable of old, already noticed the smell ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherezade A Descent into the Maelstroem Von Kempelen and his Discovery Mesmeric Revelation The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar The Black Cat The Fall of the House of Usher Silence—a Fable The Masque of the Red Death The Cask of Amontillado The Imp of the Perverse The Island of the Fay The Assignation The Pit and the Pendulum The Premature Burial The Domain of Arnheim Landor's Cottage William Wilson The Tell-Tale Heart ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... spokesman, after much entreaty to the people, concluded, at length, with this celebrated fable: "It once happened, that all the other members of a man mutinied against the stomach, which they accused as the only idle, uncontributing part in the whole body, while the rest were put to hardships and the expense of ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... forty-four years I held royal sway; I commanded the Black Heads,* and ruled them." This is no unusual origin for the founders of empires and dynasties; witness the cases of Cyrus and Bomulus.* Sargon, like Moses, and many other heroes of history or fable, is exposed to the waters: he owes his safety to a poor fellah who works his shadouf on the banks of the Euphrates to water the fields, and he passes his infancy in obscurity, if not in misery. Having ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... 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 lift voice ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... every nation on earth has some particular traditions regarding the dog. The Esquimaux, a nation inhabiting the polar regions, have a singular fable amongst them respecting the origin of the Dog-Rib Indians, a tribe which inhabits the northern confines of the American continent. It is thus detailed in Captain Franklin's "Second ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... you made a sort of myth of him? Isn't he only a fable to us now? And haven't we got ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... peculiar mental qualities, and uses them to the great prejudice and harm of the other gods. So, likewise, with many of the more human [Greek: muthoi]. We find the same ideas to spring up in the agora of Athens, the wilds and snows of Norway, and the heathers and hills of Scotland. The fable of the Sirens finds an exact counterpart in the North. Like Ulysses, Duke Magnus and innumerable others escape with difficulty from the charms and enticements of sea-nymphs. Sometimes it is their wonderful song which the earth and the elements obey as they ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Bajazet was imprisoned by Timur, so long and so often repeated as a moral lesson, is now rejected as a fable by the modern writers, who smile at the vulgar credulity. They appeal with confidence to the Persian history of Sherefeddin Ali, according to which has been given to our curiosity in a French version, and from which I shall collect and abridge, a more specious narrative of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... of guarding against the pursuit of those scribblers, who having no talents of a writer but what is taught by the writing-master, are yet nowise afraid nor ashamed to assume the same titles with the greatest genius, than their good brother in the fable was of ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... be afraid to wager that this is but another version of the fable of the statue of the man rampant and the lion couchant," thought Mr. Aylett, following with his wife in the funeral train down the grass-grown alley leading through the garden to the family burying-ground. "It would be an entertaining study of human veracity if I could hear Chilton's story, ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... the reminiscence of Homo Darwinienesis by Homo Sapiens, doubtless it would ex hypothesi be common to mankind. Yet to me Africa is the old home of the Beast-fable, because Egypt was the inventor of the alphabet, the cradle of letters, the preacher of animism and metempsychosis, and, generally, the source of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Lit. "neck." The Muslims fable that all will appear at the Day of Resurrection with their good and evil actions in visible form fastened about their necks. "And each man, we constrain him to carry his actions (ta'r, lit. bird, i.e. fortune as told by augury from the flight of birds, according to the method so much in ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... dilemma for the President and his minister to France. But by this 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. But Barlow evidently felt himself to be under some decent ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... the history of this strange fable, it will be well to extract the different accounts given of the Priest-King and his realm by early writers; and we shall then be better able to judge of the influence ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... representation (and five lines in the bill), it scarcely afforded ground for a cool and deliberate judgment of his powers. He had merely to bark, run on, and jump through an inn window, after a comic fugitive. The next scene of importance to the fable was a little marred in its interest by his over-anxiety; forasmuch as while his master (a belated soldier in a den of robbers on a tempestuous night) was feelingly lamenting the absence of his faithful dog, and laying great stress on the fact that he was thirty ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... Pentateuchal writer states that which is not true. What, therefore, is his authority on the matter—creation by a Deity—which cannot be tested? What sort of "inspiration" is that which leads to the promulgation of a fable as divine truth, which forces those who believe in that inspiration to hold on, like grim death, to the literal truth of the fable, which demoralises them in seeking for all sorts of sophistical shifts ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... in which writers of the present day, and chief among them Mr. H. Major, who has rescued these facts from the domain of fable, recognize the name of Sinclair—appears to be in fact only applicable to this ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... "the dawn that the dreamers dread. The sails of light are paling on those unwreckable galleons; the mariners that steer them slip back into fable and myth; that other sea the traffic is turning now at its ebb, and is about to hide its pallid wrecks, and to come swinging back, with its tumult, at the flow. Already the sunlight flashes in the gulfs behind the east of the world; the gods have seen it from ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... every Body. But besides this fabulous Device, which is a sufficient Instance of their Wickedness and Malice, I think it worth my while to add a remarkable Letter of Pope Stephen, adapted to the foregoing Fable; by which we may make a judgment of the Madness and folly of that old crafty Knave. This Letter is extant in Rhegino, a Benedictine Monk, and Abbot of Prunay, [Footnote: Abbot Pruniacensis] an irrefragable Testimony in an Affair of this Nature; ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... as though a good puff of wind might blow him away, and he is as tough as a pin-wire. I stand like a tower, and they tell me the foundations are sinking. It sounds like a fable to frighten me." ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... Poet knows the truth,—but what are Poets? Only the Prophets and Seers! Only the Eyes of Time, which clearly behold Heaven's Fact beyond this world's Fable. Let them sing if they choose, and we will hear them in our idle hours,—we will give them a little of our gold,—a little of our grudging praise, together with much of our private practical contempt ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... great many men, dear CONTINENTAL, who quite unwittingly are ever crying aloud, 'Look at me, chickens.' After all, 'tis only the old fable of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... doctrine of Providence; insinuates that the gods are only poetical creations; is uncertain whether the soul be immortal, but is clear that popular doctrine of punishment in the world to come is only an idle fable. ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... 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 heel into ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... author, who always generalized too quickly, had not comprehended that the admirer with Florent was grafted on a friend worthy to be painted by La Fontaine or by Balzac, the two poets of friendship, the one in his sublime and tragic Cousin Pons, the other in that short but fine fable, in which is this verse, one of the most tender ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... to feel a little like the lamb in the fable. This wolf had evidently come bent on a quarrel, and Railsford, lamb and all as he was, would have liked to oblige him. But he was quick enough to see— with the memory of more than one failure to warn him—that his only chance with Mr Bickers ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... Harry, bracing himself to demolish this absurd fable, and secure his release at a stroke. "Now, I don't understand very much about the doctrine of reincarnation, but I suppose, if I were really Manco Capac come to earth again, I should have some recollection of my former state of existence, shouldn't I? Well, will ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... page 350 of his work, says, "In her little library she had a Bible, a prayer-book, Shakespeare, and Lowell's 'Fable for the Critics,' with two or three other books." Shirley (p. 100, post) ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... its share of legends and quaint scraps of folklore, some of them nicely calculated to chill the blood o' nights. One fable, at least, has risen from a base of fact; I refer to the famous Monk of Hambleton. Ancient chronicles of this town record the arrival—in pre-Revolutionary times—of an unfortunate individual whose face had been shockingly mutilated by accident or disease. He drifted to Hambleton ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... dreams; but these two dreams destroy each other, and this is the upshot of the uncurbed licentiousness some men allow themselves of supposing as eternal truths whatever their imagination suggests them to support a fable; while they refuse to acknowledge the artful and powerful hand that formed and placed all ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... Ha! why? Do you think I fable with you? I assure you, He that has once the flower of the sun, The perfect ruby, which we call elixir, Not only can do that, but, by its virtue, Can confer honour, love, respect, long life; Give safety, valour, yea, and victory, To whom he will. In eight and twenty ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... that the history of his having established a convent, all the nuns of which were persons of more than suspected propriety, and having placed a female favourite of his own at their head, had no foundation in truth. Something similar is told of several powerful princes, so it may well be a fable altogether. ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... favourite hero of Spain, and the most prominent figure in her literature. The name, however, is so obscured by myth and fable as scarcely to belong to history. So extravagant are the deeds ascribed to him, and so marvellous the attributes with which he has been clothed by the fond idolatry of his countrymen, that by some he has been ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... turn, now trembles at Your dread Tribunal. The first and last Appeal of Players, Poets, Statesmen, Fidlers, Fools, Philosophers and Kings. If, by the boldness of his Satyr, or the daring Novelty of his Plan and Fable, He has offended, He ought to meet with some degree of Candour, as his Offence was the Effect of a Noble Gratitude, and an Over-heated Zeal to Please His Noble Guests & Patrons, whom he Scorn'd to treat with Vulgar Cates Season'd and Serv'd with Flattery and Common Dramatic Art. For this ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... have made lamentable Complaints of their being Wolves: In a word, there is no more Reality in what many Witches confess of strange things seen or done by them, whilst Satan had them in his full Power, than there is in Lucian's ridiculous Fable of his being Bewitched into an Asse, and what strange Feats he then played; so that what such persons relate concerning Persons and Things at Witch-meetings, ought not to be received ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... time I had elaborated the fable I had begun to tell in the corridor without. I had it ready now: it was ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... and much later instance is recorded by Dr. George Cheyne, in his work entitled, The English Malady, or a Treatise of Nervous Diseases, as having come under his own observation; and, as this case is exactly similar to that of the Prophet, it may amuse the reader to see how far an ancient fable may be illustrated, and in part explained, by the records of modern science. Dr. Cheyne's patient was probably cataleptic; but the worthy physician must be allowed to tell his ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... scene is whizzing round like a zoetrope at the rate of nineteen miles a second? Could we tolerate the notion of a mighty King delivering a sublime fiat and then remember that for all practical purposes he is hanging head downwards in space? A strange fable might be written of a man who was blessed or cursed with the Copernican eye, and saw all men on the earth like tintacks clustering round a magnet. It would be singular to imagine how very different the speech of an aggressive egoist, announcing the independence and divinity of man, would sound ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... Pinteado, vpon malicious informations of such as enuied the mans good fortune: euen so may it hereby appeare that in some cases euen Lions themselues may either be hindered by the contempt, or aided by the helpe of the poore mise, according vnto the fable of Esope. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... some prejudiced men have indulged a wild suspicion, as we have supposed already, Antiq. B. XV. ch. 11. sect. 7, that Josephus's history of Herod's rebuilding the temple is no better than a fable, it may not be amiss to take notice of this occasional clause in the speech of Alexander before his father Herod, in his and his brother's vindication, which mentions the temple as known by every body to have been built ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... with it. The common law of inheritance may be expected to keep both the original and the variety mainly true as long as they last, and none the less so because they have given rise to occasional varieties. The tailless Manx cats, like the curtailed fox in the fable, have not induced the normal breeds to dispense with their tails, nor have the Dorkings (apparently known to Pliny) affected the permanence of the common sort ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... discovers at every step that nothing can be known, yet will not give up the unprofitable pursuit, because, even while making the discovery, he still hopes vainly that he may yet, in his own person, give the maxim the lie. For ever soaring to the sun, he was for ever realizing the fine Grecian fable of Icarus; and the sea of disappointment into which he perpetually fell, with its tumultuous tides and ever-chafing billows, bearing him on from whirlpool to whirlpool, for ever battling and for ever lost. He was ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... of action which took place, either in progressive skill, or 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 ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... whether the kid or the satin slippers had been chosen, and she went down to lunch still revolving her trouble in her mind. On the dining-room wall opposite her place at table were two fine old engravings, illustrating the fable of the famous dinners given by the Fox and the Stork. In the first the stork strove vainly to fill its bill at the flat dish from which the fox lapped eagerly, while in the companion picture the fox sat by disconsolate while the stork dipped into the high slim ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... quicklime, then leaps in himself, to deceive the world and leave no trace of mortality behind. His enemies believe, as he desired, that he and his people have been taken up into heaven. The whole, however, is dimly prescient, and the concluding lines of the fable have been thought by believers in augury to be prophetic. "Incredible instance! How far can the passion for fame go!" Among the papers of this period are also a constitution for the "calotte," a secret ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... dwell therein the sheep of Francis saw the lamb of Jean de la Fontaine amid the forget-me-nots which were of the mirror-like color of the waves. It no longer disputed with the wolf of the fable. It drank, and the water did not become turbid thereat. The untamed spring over which the two hundred year old ivy seemed to have thrown a shadow of bitterness, streamed on amid the grass with its broken waves in which were mirrored the ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... that this was as pitiful a ruse of self-deception as that of the fox in the fable unable to reach the luscious grapes above him. For as well might a starving man seek to compel by an effort of his will the hunger to cease from gnawing ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... a Greek fable I remember reading as a boy at school, of the ground being sown with teeth, and out of it coming armed men. I cannot help thinking that we must have looked very much like those ready-made heroes, as I and my companions struggled up out of the ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... persons, notably in the case of Captain Miles Standish and John Alden, in which case the fair maiden herself is given the credit of admonishing the envoy to court for himself. It is very sure, however, that this latter story is a fable. It was probably founded on the one ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... the evening, Jerrold spoke with high appreciation of Emerson; and of Longfellow, whose Hiawatha he considered a wonderful performance; and of Lowell, whose Fable for Critics he especially admired. I mentioned Thoreau, and proposed to send his works to Dr. ———, who, being connected with the Illustrated News, and otherwise a writer, might be inclined to draw attention to then. Douglas Jerrold asked why he should ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... started, When youth departed From the half-hearted Riccardi's bride; For, saith your fable, Great Love is able To slip the cable And take ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... supported the whole edifice of our moral and spiritual state. The inhabitants of the earth had grown too enlightened to define their faith within a form of words, or to limit the spiritual by any analogy to our material existence. Truths which the heavens trembled at were now but a fable of the world's infancy. Therefore, as the final sacrifice of human error, what else remained to be thrown upon the embers of that awful pile, except the book which, though a celestial revelation to past ages, was but a voice from a lower sphere as regarded ...
— Earth's Holocaust (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... cause—carelessness. There are quite a number of instances in which fires have been started by lightning, but they are few in number as compared with those due to human agency. The old tale of fires being caused by two branches of a dead tree rubbing against each other is, of course, a fable." ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Nineveh and its Remains and Nineveh and Babylon. Layard carefully examined Nebbi Junus, which is held in great veneration by the Mussulmans, and came to the conclusion that the tradition which places Jonah's tomb on this spot is a mere fable (p. 596). It will be seen that Benjamin speaks of the Shrine as a Synagogue. At Alkush near Mosul the tomb of Nahum is pointed out, and the Arabs say that after Jonah had fulfilled his mission to the people of Nineveh they relapsed into idolatry. Then ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... do we see giddy, coquetting, restless girls become sobered by marriage? A great object in life is decided; one on which their thoughts have been running in all their vagaries, and they seem to verify the beautiful fable of Undine. A new soul beams out in the gentleness and repose of their future lives. An indescribable softness and tenderness takes place of the wearying vanity of their former endeavours to attract ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... repaired to Bayonne with his inseparable friend the Prince of the Peace is well known. Napoleon, who had undertaken to be arbiter between the father and son, thought the best way of settling the difference was to give the disputed throne to his brother Joseph, thus verifying the fable of the "Two Lawyers and the Oyster." The insurrection in Madrid on the 2d of May accelerated the fate of Ferdinand, who was accused of being the author of it; at least this suspicion fell on ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plough and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were savages. 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 ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... knew, of spears and ships, of heroic chiefs and beggar men, of hunts and sieges, of mountains where the lion roamed, and of fairy isles where a goddess walked alone. He lived on the marches of the land of fable, when half the Mediterranean was a sea unsailed, when even Italy was as dimly descried as the City of the Sun in Elizabeth's reign. Of all that he knew he sang, but Virgil could only follow and imitate, with a ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... Glistonbury, "my patience is now exhausted, and I must not let you expose yourself here, before our friend, as a novice—Hey! hey!—Why, will you never open your eyes, and see the world as it is! Why! what!—Did you never read the fable of the dog and his master's meat?—Well! it is come to that now in England; and he is a foolish dog, indeed, who, when he can't save the meat, won't ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... as the sea line, extending east and west from Terracina in the bay of Fondi, the Volscian Anxur, to the angle of the coast where rises suddenly, between the marshes and the sea, the mountain promontory of Circeii, celebrated alike in history and in fable. Within the space visible from this one point, the destinies of the human race were decided. It took the Romans nearly five hundred years to vanquish and incorporate the warlike tribes who inhabited that narrow tract, but, ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... his ancestors, what clouds, What waters, or what gods, from his embrace. Aroar then sudden, as though roused, renewed. "Come thou, if ardour urges thee and force Suffices—mark me, Gebir, I unfold No fable to allure thee—on! behold Thy ancestors!" and lo! with horrid gasp The panting flame above his head recoiled, And thunder through his heart and life blood throbbed. Such sound could human organs once conceive, Cold, speechless, palsied, not the soothing voice ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... course of things, follow them. Such an epoch of expansion seems to be opening in this country. In the first place all danger of a hostile forcible pressure of foreign ideas upon our practice has long disappeared; like the traveller in the fable, therefore, we begin to wear our cloak a little more loosely. Then, with a long peace, the ideas of Europe steal gradually and amicably in, and mingle, though in infinitesimally small quantities at a time, with our ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... authors, particularly from Pliny, and describing Mesopotamia, Chaldea, Albania, Hircania, Bactria, Iberia, and others, as if such had actually existed in the geography of the fourteenth century. Where any thing like modern appears, it is some childish fable, as that the ark of Noah was still visible on mount Ararat. He even gives the ancient fable of the Amazons, whom he represents ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... word whatever about dominion; all he dared conjecture for his city was safety. Even that is put in a highly hypothetical mood. The augury begins with an "if," regarding the apocryphal story of Romulus and the twelve vultures. But whether the fable of the vultures be true or not, the augury of twelve centuries of safety deduced from it is undeniably false, whether it refers to the material city, or to the political constitution then established. The city then built was burnt ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... journalism, the art of repeating a name again and again with some ridiculous or evil association. The preparation had begun after the first performance of 'The Shadow of the Glen,' Synge's first play, with an assertion made in ignorance but repeated in dishonesty, that he had taken his fable and his characters, not from his own mind nor that profound knowledge of cot and curragh he was admitted to possess, but 'from a writer of the Roman decadence.' Some spontaneous dislike had been but natural, for genius like his can but slowly, amid what it has of harsh ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... expectation of what is coming." As George H. Lewes remarked, it is quite evident that Aristotle could never have held a bird in his hand. The idea, however, that eating the heart of an animal has wisdom-conferring virtue seems to underlie a very interesting Hebrew fable published by Dr. Steinschneider, in his Alphabetum Siracidis. The Angel of Death had demanded of God the power ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... without venturing to lay my paws on him; for I bethought me of that ass in AEsop's Fables, who was ass enough to think of fondling his master in the same manner as his favourite lap-dog, and was well basted for his pains. I understood that fable to signify, that what is graceful and comely in some is not so in others. Let the ribald flout and jeer, the mountebank tumble,—let the common fellow, who has made it his business, imitate the song of birds and the gestures of animals, ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... after these shares. I replied that such conduct would be that of a fool, the conduct of impertinence, rather than of conceit; that it was not mine, and that since he pressed me so much I would tell him my reasons. They were, that since the fable of Midas, I had nowhere read, still less seen, that anybody had the faculty of converting into gold all he touched; that I did not believe this virtue was given to Law, but thought that all his knowledge was a learned ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... now grown so familiar to teachers that it will serve for illustration without repetition here. It is the type of story which specifically teaches a certain ethical or conduct lesson, in the form of a fable or an allegory,—it passes on to the child the conclusions as to conduct and character, to which the race has, in general, attained through centuries of experience and moralizing. The story becomes a part of the outfit of received ideas on manners ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... days and weeks that followed the devout and passionate fancy of a few mourning Galileans begat the exquisite fable of the Resurrection. How natural—and amid all its falseness—how true, is that naive and contradictory story! The rapidity with which it spread is a measure of many things. It is, above all, a measure of the greatness of Jesus, of ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... thee the shores and sounding seas Wash far away,—where'er thy bones are hurl'd; Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides Where thou perhaps, under the whelming tide Visitest the bottom of the monstrous world; Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied, Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old, Where the great Vision of the guarded mount Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold, —Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth: —And, O ye ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... the old fable about the dog with the piece of meat in his mouth, seeing his reflection in the stream and thinking it was another dog ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... medal is the Lobster, though doubtless it had an allusion to some topic or scandal of the day; whoever can elucidate it will render good service to Medallic History, for hitherto it has baffled all commentators and collectors of medals. The windmill (indicative of the poplar fable that the Prince was the son of a miller), and the Roman Catholic symbols, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 4, Saturday, November 24, 1849 • Various
... number of convictions is greater, and the jails are already cracking their seams to contain the convicts. One might almost conclude that prisons, as now administered, stimulate crime instead of preventing it, and that we are in the predicament of Hercules in the fable, who, as fast as he cut off a head of the hydra, saw two others sprout in its place. At which rate, we might be led on to the surmise that it would be financially cheaper to let crime run on; the cost of our futile efforts to stop ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... Talisker, stopped for some time; then wheeled round to the same direction with ours, and then came briskly after us. He sets open a window in the coldest day or night, and stands before it. It may do with his constitution; but most people, amongst whom I am one, would say, with the frogs in the fable, 'This may be sport to you; but it is death to us.' It is in vain to try to find a meaning in every one of his particularities, which, I suppose, are mere habits, contracted by chance; of which every man has some that ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... about that fable now," said their mother; "you understand the meaning of the verse. It was written to good men; it says that God gave them life and feeling, when they were dead in trespasses and sins. But I must first tell you ...
— Caleb in the Country • Jacob Abbott
... came Glory, just as the fable was ended for the fourth time, bringing the last little chick, flushed and rosy from a bath; born into beauty, like Venus from the sea; her fair hair, combed and glossy, hanging about her neck in curls; and wrapped, not in a "round-o-caliker," but ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... is a lie," observed Sir Robert Walpole, the corruptionist, mindful of what was likely to be written about himself; and "What is history," asked Napoleon, the conqueror, "but a fable agreed upon?" ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... The fable and structure of Michael Kramer illustrate Hauptmann's typical themes and methods well. The whole of the first act is exposition. It is not, however, the exposition of antecedent actions or events, but wholly of character. The conditions of ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... betrayed earnest thought and intense feeling. She aimed to impress the truth, not her style, and therefore aimed at plainness and directness. Her hard common sense, of which her books reveal a goodly share, was offset by her vivid fancy which made even the region of fable tributary to the service ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... fable availed. Amabel had suffered a good deal from Bogy; and, though the fear of him did not seem so terrible by daylight, she had no wish to meet him. But one lovely afternoon, wandering round the field ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... There must have been some confusion in the orders given." And Matrena reddened, for she loathed a lie and it was in tribulation of spirit that she used this fable under Rouletabille's directions. ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... compared me to a nymph in the fable he was wrong; but he never addressed to me a word in French that was not in good taste. Before we condemn him, uncle, let us see for ourselves. It is a habit you have always recommended to me, ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... with a broken arrow at his feet. A poem, "To Psyche," came with it, and Rose was much surprised at the beauty of the lines, for, instead of being witty, complimentary, or gay, there was something nobler than mere sentiment in them, and the sweet old fable lived again in language which fitly painted the maiden Soul looking for a Love worthy to ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... allowance was to be reduced to pure water, and when its owner's hope appeared certain of speedy realisation, the animal died. There are men who act almost as foolishly as the parsimonious horse owner in this fable did; and who are as properly punished as he was. Such men are to be found in the farmers who overstock their sheep pastures, and whose "lean kine" are the laughing stock ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron |
