"Fable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the bitterness of his soul. He beheld himself to be as the dog in the fable that had dropped the substance to snatch at ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... said the soul, "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 ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... down in your kingdom and see what a royal throne you occupied? What a reception your flowers give you! The ambrosia and nectar of the feasts of the deities of fable are overshadowed by the fragrance and sweetness of your worshippers. It would seem that every flower, like a royal subject, was bent on rendering the most exalted honor to her king. No company of maidens preparing for nuptials were ever arrayed like these. ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... We children had been watching and waiting for it. The house had been stripped bare; many cases of goods were awaiting shipment around Cape Horn to California. California! A land of fable! We knew well enough that our father was there, and had been for two years or more; and that we were at last to go to him, and dwell there with the fabulous in a new home more or less fabulous,—yet we felt that it must be altogether lovely. We said good-bye ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... of his cab with fully half his cry to finish out; and, curiously, all the time a sad little story from an old holiday in the country kept haunting him. It was at once a fact and a fable concerning a happy little family of swallows, whose sudden tragedy he had seen with his own boyish, ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... but a legend I know,— A fable, a phantom, a show, Of the ancient Rabbinical lore; Yet the old mediaeval tradition, The beautiful, strange superstition, But haunts me and holds ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... known for the last thirty or forty years; and we English are, as good King Alfred found us to his sorrow a thousand years ago, very slow to move, even when we see a thing ought to be done. Let us hope that in this matter—we have been so in most matters as yet—we shall be like the tortoise in the fable, and not the hare; and by moving slowly, but surely, win the race at last. But now think for yourself: and see what you would do to save these people from being poisoned by bad water. Remember that the plain question is this—The rainwater comes down from heaven as ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... A trembling hand against his throbbing breast, His aimless fingers touched a treasured part Of the green holly-branch of Elfinhart, Laid in his breast when he put off his arms. What perils now are left in fairy charms? For poets fable when they call love blind; Love's habitation is the purer mind, Whence with his keen eyes he may penetrate All mists and fogs that baser spells create. Love? What is love? Not the wild feverish thrill, When heart to heart the thronging pulses fill, And lips ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... true A copy pencil never drew. My Muse her song 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 ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... The fable consists of a single event—of the transition from the highest pomp and profusion of artificial refinement to the most abject state of savage life, and privation of all social intercourse. The change is as rapid as it is complete; nor is the description of the rich and generous Timon, banqueting ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... "You know the fable of the fox and the grapes," Bell said, her gray eyes flashing indignantly upon her sister, who, wisely forbore further remarks upon Helen's hands and contented herself with wondering if people generally would take up ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... 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
... wonder of its sea-caves. Her childhood had known nothing of fairyland, and now, in this tardy awakening of the imaginative part of her nature, she thought sometimes of Capri much as a child is wont to think of the enchanted countries, nameless, regionless, in books of fable. ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... not seize this famous robber? First of all, she kept on asking her husband about it, and he replied that the whole story about Fatia Negra was only a Wallachian fable. It was true that robberies were committed by men who regularly wore black masks, but it was never one and the same man who was guilty of these misdeeds. Nevertheless the name had won a sort of nimbus of notoriety among the common people, ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... of flattery, 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 ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... the kettle sizzled there all the evening, giving off anything but an agreeable odor. We were translating the fable of "The Mouse and the Peasant" that night, and nihil Mehurcule is still mixed up in my mind with the odor of that ...
— The Youth's Companion - Volume LII, Number 11, Thursday, March 13, 1879 • Various
... In fable or romance of Uther's son, Begirt with British and Armoric knights; And all who since, baptized or infidel, Jousted in Aspramont, or Montalban, Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond, Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... planted with all manner of fair flowers and lordly trees, and in my folly believed that those who had been my friends were forever after assured of pleasant places, lovely perfumes, and grateful shade; but like the Grecian in the ancient fable, I found I had sown dragon's teeth, and the crop I reaped was of hatred ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... consequence. One betrayed his master and the other did likewise, only with far greater subtlety and wickedness—teaching thousands to disbelieve his claims to godhood—to regard Christianity as a crude compound of Greek mythology and Jewish tradition—a thing built of myth and fable. Even if these two were damned and all the rest were saved—can you not see that a knowledge of their suffering would embitter heaven itself to another hell? Father Riley was good enough to tell us last week of the state of unbaptised infants after ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... by, said, significantly, 'Take care that not a leaf remains on that tree by the morning.' The woman understood the metaphor, and in an hour or two, aided by other strapping Zulu females, attacked the unfortunate Basuto and killed him with clubs. But Cetywayo having thus, like the monkey in the fable, employed a cat's paw to do his dirty work, began to think the Basuto's untimely death might have an ugly appearance in my eyes, so gave orders in my presence that, as a punishment, six of the women who had killed the Basuto should also be put to death. ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... himself. It is the deepest, it is the best in him, but it may not be in the least his own yet. It is one thing to have a mine of gold in one's ground, know it, and work it; and another to have the mine still but regard the story as a fable, throw the aureal hints that find their way to the surface as playthings to the woman who herself is but a plaything in the owner's eyes, and mock her when she takes them for precious. In a word, every man in love shows better than he is, though, thank God, ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... condition of Society, equivalent to defying his perpetual fellest enmity? 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? Does ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... blood from vigorous frames. Jesus Christ passes His own blood into our veins and makes us immortal. The Church chose for one of its ancient emblems of the Saviour the pelican, which fed its young, according to the fable, with blood from its own breast. So Christ vitalises us. He in us ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... nature very well when he wrote his fable of the old man and his ass, who tried to please everybody and ended up by pleasing nobody. Bearing this in mind, Madame Midas determined to please herself, and take no one's advice but her own with regard to Vandeloup. She ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... comet was said to have caused the flood; but in the strange characters of the Zend is the legend of an ark (as it were) prepared against the snow. It may be that it is the dim memory of a glacial epoch. In this deep coombe, amid the dark oaks and snow, was the fable of Zoroaster. For the coming of Ormuzd, the Light and Life Bringer, the leaf slept folded, the butterfly was hidden, the germ concealed, while the sun swept upwards ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... German petty princes, and in the other the intolerance of the Established Church. We may assume that is the reason why Lowell admired them; but Lowell was also too critical and polemic to be wholly a poet,—except on certain occasions. In 1847 he published the "Fable for Critics," the keenest piece of poetical satire since Byron's "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,"—keen and even saucy, but perfectly good-humored. About the same time he commenced his "Biglow Papers," which did not wholly cease until 1866, and were the most incisive and aggressive anti-slavery ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... the "Survey of Cornwall," published in 1769, and he gives an explanation of the custom which is no doubt erroneous, but is curious for other reasons. "It may be," he says, "this device took original from the Master of Bedlam, who (the fable sayeth) used to cure his patients of that impatience by keeping them bound in pools up to the middle, and so more or less after the fit of their fury" (p. 123). The present Master goes further, and keeps them up to the neck ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... father says that his daughter's tale is unreasonable.] Then more I meled & sayde apert, "Me ynk y tale vnresou{n}able, Godde[gh] ry[gh]t is redy & eu{er} more rert,[20] O{er} holy wryt is bot a fable; 592 I{n} sauter is sayd a verce ouerte at speke[gh] a poy{n}t determynable, '{o}u quyte[gh] vchon as hys desserte, {o}u hy[gh]e ky{n}g ay p{re}termynable,'[21] 596 Now he at stod e long day ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... was more influenced by some other characteristics of Scotland than he was by its scenery. There was, first, its romantic history. That had not then been separated, as it has since been, from the mists of fable, but lay exactly in that twilight point of view best adapted for arousing the imagination. To the eye of Burns, as it glared back into the past, the history of his country seemed intensely poetical—including the line of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... don't quite understand. He asserts that my 'deleterious works' have had 'an effect upon civil society, which requires,' &c. &c. &c. and his own poetry. It is a lengthy poem, and a long preface, with a harmonious title-page. Like the fly in the fable, I seem to have got upon a wheel which makes much dust; but, unlike the said fly, I do not take it all ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... within each Book, and grouped after their Fables. The name is spelled "Aesop" in Riley, "Esop" in Smart and in the Contents. Inconsistencies in fable numbering are described at the beginning of the Table ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... the mission of art is a mission of sentiment and love, that the novel of to-day should take the place of the parable and the fable of early times, and that the artist has a larger and more poetic task than that of suggesting certain prudential and conciliatory measures for the purpose of diminishing the fright caused by his pictures. His aim should be to render attractive ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... also that of his country with the vastest and noblest enterprise inscribed in the annals of history. And each one moved over his own favorite route toward his own goal. It was an apt illustration of the Russian fable of the swan, the crab, and the pike being harnessed together in order to remove a load. The swan flew upward, the crab crawled backward, the pike made with all haste for the water, and the load remained where ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... the pety Bretaine, And so haue enemies enuiron round about. I beseech God, that some prayers deuout Mutt let the said apparance probable Thus disposed without feyned fable. But all onely for perill that I see Thus imminent, it's likely for to bee, And well I wotte, that from hence to Rome, And, as men say, in all Christendome, Is no ground ne land to Ireland liche, So large, so good, so plenteous, so riche, That to this worde ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... Fancies grew out of a fable by Pilpay, which Mr. Browning read when a boy. He ... put this into verse; and it then occurred to him to make the poem the beginning of a series, in which the Dervish who is first introduced as a learner should ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... had only interpreted their findings for modern use. There was the tragedy, which had certain proper parts and a certain fixed order of treatment laid down for it; there was the heroic poem, which had a story or "fable," which must be treated in a certain fixed manner, and so on. The authors of the "Classic" period so christened themselves because they observed these rules. And they fancied that they had the temper of the Augustan time—the temper displayed in the works of Horace ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... them built pyramids and founded cities, and appear to have ruled gloriously. They maintained, and even increased, the power and splendour of Egypt. But the history of the Memphite Empire unfortunately loses itself in legend and fable, and becomes a ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... singular hold on our affection seems, therefore, to be his rare quality of presenting the unusual but typical dream or reverie as a beautiful object of interest, without endeavoring to give it the character of an allegory or a fable. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... branch which shelters the coralillo, this enemy of man, coiling its tail round the branch, dives down into space with all the length of is body, and strikes with its fangs at the man's forehead. This curious fact was long considered to be a mere fable, but it has now been verified, and belongs to the natural history of India. In these cases the natives see in the snake the envoy of Death, the fulfiller of the will of the bloodthirsty ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... 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 ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... Veronica ever been asserted to be other than symbolic by the sincere teachers of the Church; and, even so far as in that merely explanatory function, it became the seal of an extreme sorrow, it is not easy to understand how the pensive fable was associated with a flower so familiar, so bright, and so popularly of good omen, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... 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 days, I'll ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... red ink. In his little cyclist hand-book there is a diary, and in the diary there is an entry of these things—it is there to this day, and I cannot do better than reproduce it here to witness that this book is indeed a true one, and no lying fable written to while ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... hostile faction is silent, or unheeded; even criticism is gentle and timid. If history had said its last word, if no more were to be known of him than is already written, his fame, however lacking in definite outline, however distorted by fable, would survive undiminished to the latest generations. The blessings of an enfranchised race would forever hail him as their liberator; the nation would acknowledge him as the mighty counselor whose patient courage and wisdom saved the life of the republic in its darkest hour; and illuminating his ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... the temple of Medinet Abu. The glory of Thebes belongs to a period prior to the commencement of authentic history. It is recorded only in the dim lights of poetry and tradition, which might be suspected of fable, did not such mighty witnesses remain to attest their truth. Strabo and Diodorus Siculus described Thebes under the name of Diospolis (the city of God), and gave such magnificent descriptions of its monuments as caused ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... charming irrelevance, "Johnson is the Hercules who strangled serpents in his cradle." The last of Goldsmith's hits was suggested by Johnson's shaking his sides with laughter because Goldsmith admired the skill with which the little fishes in the fable were made to talk in character. "Why, Dr. Johnson, this is not so easy as you seem to think," was the retort, "for if you were to make little fishes talk, they ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... the good is invariably productive of good. The good character is diffusive in his influence. "I was common clay till roses were planted in me," says some aromatic earth in the Eastern fable. Like begets like, and good makes good. "It is astonishing," says Canon Moseley, "how much good goodness makes. Nothing that is good is alone, nor anything bad; it makes others good or others bad—and that other, and so on: like a stone ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... thrilling in interest, in the details of character and adventure, in the incessant panoramic display it gave of light and shade. And on it rested the shadow of a strange, pathetic doubt, the mystery of creation. Its romance, its fiction, its fable, and the animating picture it furnished, with its sceptics and its believers, its haters and its lovers, its tyrants and its heroes. Its wide, verbal immensity! I miss all that, or almost all. This life is evenly ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... Bishop of Avranches supposes That all these large and varying doses Of fable mean ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... thought I was mad. He stared at me for a minute, and then, with an indescribable intonation, said, "How de ol' Satan yew fink yew gwain ter get'm, hey? Ef yew spects ter fool dis chile wiv any dem lime-juice yarns, 'bout lanterns 'n boats at night-time, yew's 'way off." I guessed he meant the fable current among English sailors, that if you hoist a sail on a calm night in a boat where flying-fish abound, and hang a lantern in the middle of it, the fish will fly in shoals at the lantern, strike against the sail, and fall in heaps in the boat. It MAY be true, but I never spoke to anybody ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... he will try the case; if not, let them forever be silent." In every essay that follows, there are the same great odds and the same electric call to the youth to face them. It is, indeed, as much a world of fable and romance that Emerson introduces us to as we get in Homer or Herodotus. It is true, all true,—true as Arthur and his knights, or Pilgrim's Progress, and I pity the man who has not tasted its intoxication, or who can ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... is extracted from Mr. Newton's "Defence," and will give us an idea of his sentiments. He was speaking of the fable ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... degree, to myself. Your letter must dispel the unreasoning and I fear envious scepticism of MacCribb, who has put forth a plaunflet (I love that old spelling) in which he derides the history of Aldobrand Oldenbuck as a fable. The Ballad shall, indeed, have an honoured place in my poor Collection whenever the public taste calls for a new edition. But the original, what would I not give to have it in my hands, to touch the very parchment which came ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... and in the great room rose the busy silence of those minutes which precede repasts. Suddenly the four men by the breakfast fable stood back. Lord ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and characters of this book from my memory. To me it can never appear like an amusing fable, or lose its interest and importance, the story is one which is continually before me, and must return fresh to my mind, with painful emotions, as long as I live. With time, and Christian instruction, and the sympathy and example of the ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... love, of which she had never felt herself capable; when she has confessed her love, how absolutely the man whom she loves dominates her! How strong he feels with his cruel right to say: You do no more for love than you have done for money. They know not what proof to give. A child, says the fable, having often amused himself by crying "Help! a wolf!" in order to disturb the labourers in the field, was one day devoured by a Wolf, because those whom he had so often deceived no longer believed in his cries for help. It is the same with these unhappy ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... dimly known, the man who had reached India, China, or the Islands of the Sea, and returned to describe his adventures, made his narrative a matter of conscience, and justly considered that he had added something to the stock of human knowledge. The world of fable had not then contracted into as narrow limits as at present; foreign countries were full of marvels, and science had not made clear the phenomena of nature. The old travelers had all the wonder and the ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... 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. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... embraced in Windsor Forest, where the Norman laid his broad palm on a space a hundred and twenty miles round, and, like the lion in the fable of the hunting-party, informed his subjects that that was his share. The domain dwindled, as did other royal appurtenances. Yet in 1807 the circuit was as much as seventy-seven miles. In 1789 it embraced sixty thousand acres. The ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... many, who never can forgive another for being more agreeable and more accomplished than themselves, and who can pardon any offence rather than an eclipsing merit. Had the nightingale in the fable conquered his vanity, and resisted the temptation of shewing a fine voice, he might have escaped the talons of the hawk. The melody of his singing was the cause of his destruction; his merit brought him into danger, and his ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... "White Paper" shows that England's claim that she entered this war solely as a protector of the small nations is a fable. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... thousand bridges quicker. Science and art alone won't do, The work will call for patience, too; Costs a still spirit years of occupation: Time, only, strengthens the fine fermentation. To tell each thing that forms a part Would sound to thee like wildest fable! The devil indeed has taught the art; To make it not the devil is able. [Espying the animals.] See, what a genteel breed we here parade! This is the house-boy! that's the maid! [To the animals.] Where's the old lady gone ...
— Faust • Goethe
... no more? Return, thou virgin-bloom on Nature's face; Ah, only on the Minstrel's magic shore, Can we the footstep of sweet Fable trace! The meadows mourn for the old hallowing life; Vainly we search the earth of gods bereft; Where once the warm and living shapes were rife, Shadows ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... and also 'had their schools for teaching the arts and sciences, dancing, fencing, and fiddling.' He criticises them severely: 'They drink, sing and dance,' and, with a fine allusion to emphasise his point, declares: 'But the Americans have not that careless volatility, like the cockle in the fable, to sing and dance when the house is on fire over them.' The French were released after the abdication of Napoleon; a year later, peace was signed between England and America, and then, till 1850, the buildings were unoccupied. ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... 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
... Lancelot were no better than they should be, although very poetical personages and true knights, "sans peur," though not "sans reproche." If the story of the institution of the "Garter" be not a fable, the knights of that order have for several centuries borne the badge of a Countess of Salisbury, of indifferent memory. So much for chivalry. Burke need not have regretted that its days are over, though Marie-Antoinette ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... Her mother was three months in teaching her only to repeat the "Beggar's Petition"; and after all, her next sister, Sally, could say it better than she did. Not that Catherine was always stupid—by no means; she learnt the fable of "The Hare and Many Friends" as quickly as any girl in England. Her mother wished her to learn music; and Catherine was sure she should like it, for she was very fond of tinkling the keys of the old forlorn spinnet; so, at eight years old ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... the classroom, they do not mind it, but as an actual fact, here in the light 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, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... yere. Feb. 22nd, a sharp anger betwene me and the Bishop of Leightyn in the towr, for that he wold not shew his farder interest to Nangle: he sayd that after I had seen his brode seal of commendation, that I had institution and induction to the Nangle. Then I sayd his lordship did fable. He there uppon that so moved that he called me spitefully "coniver." I told him that he did lye in so saying, and that I wold try on the fleysh of him, or by a bastaned gown of him, if he wer not prisoner in the Towr. Inter 12 et ...
— The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee - And the Catalog of His Library of Manuscripts • John Dee
... the dead was ridiculous, and only meant to keep up a belief in the fable of purgatory, as the fate of all is finally decided, on the departure of the soul ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... that certain honest women act in dividing up the celibates, as the lion in the fable did? What! Surely, in that case, half at least of our altars would become ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... at a stand. His next step he could not see. Capt'n Davy must not be allowed to leave the island, but how to keep him from going away was a bewildering difficulty. To tell him the truth was impossible, and to concoct a further fable was beyond Lovibond's invention. And so it was that when Lovi-bond received the letter from Jenny Crow, he rose to the cue it offered like a drowning man ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... For Homer also curiously wove similar stories, and is most pleasant, yet was disagreeable to my boyish taste. In truth, the difficulty of a foreign tongue dashed as with gall all the sweetness of the Greek fable. For not one word of it did I understand, and to make me learn I was urged vehemently with cruel threats and stripes. Yet I learned with delight the fictions in Latin concerning the wicked doings of Jove and Juno, and for this I was pronounced a helpful boy, being applauded above many ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... the pilgrim travellers now claims our attention, and we turn to the frozen north, to the wild region at the back of the north wind, for new activity and discovery. Out of this land of fable and myth, legend and poetry, the fierce inhabitants of Scandinavia begin to take shape. Tacitus speaks of them as "mighty in fame," Ptolemy as "savage and clothed in ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... listening to the whispering of the leaves above you, and catching glimpses through them, of a sky so deliciously blue, and stars so wonderfully bright. It seemed as though in this favoured spot, the fable of a perpetual summer was to be realised, and the whole circle of the year was to be crowned with the same freshness and verdure and beauty, the same profusion of fruits and flowers, which we had thus far enjoyed. But such expectations, ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... so long that I could not help thinking of the frog in the fable, that wanted to swell itself as big as the ox. Then I looked into his face earnestly. Slap went the lid of his right eye; down went my head, and up went my heels. We shot through the passage like an arrow, and ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... thinking of starting a racing stable, and finished up by believing that he really was a fashionable man, and strutted about, and was puffed out with conceit, as he had probably never read La Fontaine's fable, in which he tells the story of the ass that is laden with relics which people salute, and so takes their bows ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... The fable is thin. Our pungent contrivers of plots would see no indication of life in the outlines. The life of the comedy is in the idea. As with the singing of the sky-lark out of sight, you must love the bird to be attentive to the song, so in this highest ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... between us and the history of Ireland, but through this mist there shine a few great and sunlike figures whose glory cannot be altogether hidden, and of these figures Cormac is the greatest and the brightest. Much that is told about him may be true, and much is certainly fable, but the fables themselves are a witness to his greatness; they are like forms seen in the mist when a great light is shining behind it, and we cannot always say when we are looking at the true light and when at the ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... reputation was known to some of those who havo spoken about it; if so, they attributed what they heard to the love of the marvellous and the romantic, natural to the non-scientific mind; or else preferred not to import into their writings matter which has so great a likeness to fable, and might have the effect of imperilling their reputation ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... she slept once in the bed before her, she could never be content in her mother's house again. All that she had read and believed of the beauty of cheap and simple ornament, and the vulgarity of costliness, recurred to her as a hypocritical paraphrase of the "sour grapes" of the fox in the fable. She pictured to herself with a shudder the effect of a sixpenny Chinese umbrella in that fireplace, a cretonne valance to that bed, or chintz curtains to those windows. There was in the room a series of mirrors consisting ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... the main question, he looks upon the vagaries of others with a gentle eye. M. Halevy, it seems to me, is made of somewhat sterner stuff. He raises a warning voice now and then—in Fanny Lear, for instance, the moral is pointed explicitly—and even where there is no moral tagged to the fable, he who has eyes to see and ears to hear can find "a terrible example" in almost any of these plays, even the lightest. For the congregation to which it was delivered there is a sermon in Toto chez Tata, perhaps the piece in which, above all others, the Muse seems Gallic and egrillarde. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... return any that come into his possession, Ahto is not incapable of generosity. For example, once when a shepherd lad was whittling a stick on the bank of a river, he dropped his knife into the stream. Ahto, as in the fable, "Mercury and the Woodman," moved by the tears of the unfortunate lad, swam to the scene, dived to the bottom, brought up a knife of gold, and gave it to the young shepherd. Innocent and honest, the herd-boy said the knife was not his. Then Ahto dived again, and brought up a knife ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... place, when St. Mark, snatched into ecstasy, heard the voice of an angel saying to him: 'Peace be to thee, Mark; here shall thy body rest.'" The angel goes on to foretell the building of "una stupenda, ne piu veduta Citta;" but the fable is hardly ingenious enough ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... instantly recollecting herself, she shrank back from him with loathing, as a mean and paltry dastard. "No, no," she cried, "you are no longer the man I loved; our vows of fidelity were pledged over the Bible; that book you have renounced as a fable; and he who has proved himself false to Heaven, can never ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... hyena, jackal, wild boar, and wolf, there he saw them sitting at the entrance, or stopping suddenly as they prowled along, and eyeing him, but not daring to approach. He strode along from rock to rock, and over precipices, with the certainty and ease of some giant in Eastern fable. Suddenly a beast of prey came across him; in a moment he had torn up by the roots the stump of a wild vine plant, which was near him; had thrown himself upon his foe before it could act on the aggressive, ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... story that Priene was saved under Alyattes by a stratagem of the philosopher Bias is merely a fable, of which several other examples are found. It would not be possible to conclude from it, as Grote did, that Ardys' rule over the town was ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... them. The seceders at first were for brazening it out, but were brought to reason in a remarkable way. When they kept up a series of disorderly shouts, Agrippa, one of the envoys, begged them to hearken to a fable and having obtained their consent spoke as follows. Once all the Members of Man began a contention against the Belly, saying that they worked and toiled without food or drink, being at the beck and call of the Belly in everything, ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... It is a monthly magazine, publishing stories short and serial, article and essay; drama, verse, satire and sermon; dialogue, fable and fantasy, comment and review. It is written entirely ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... year of his age he exiled himself voluntarily from his beloved country to preach the Gospel to the pagan Picts. The story of his having been banished from Ireland for using his influence to bring about a bloody conflict between chieftains is rejected by the greatest modern historians as a fable. Early writers speak of the saint as a man of mild ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... reason to know,—how much may be added to the firmness of the feeling by personal merit. The respect of which we speak should, in the strongest degree, be a possession of the immediate occupant, and will naturally become dim,—or perhaps be exaggerated,—in regard to the past, as history or fable may tell of them. No one need hesitate to speak his mind of King John, let him be ever so strong a stickler for the privileges of majesty. But there are degrees of distance, and the throne of which we wish to preserve the dignity seems to be assailed ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... for Israel from a family to a nation, and towards the close of the period Balaam, an outsider, bears witness in spite of himself to the growing numbers of the nation and to its glorious future.—In literary form it is a 'mixed epic' or 'canti-fable': a story in prose that breaks into verse at appropriate places. (Compare the expression took up his parable: the parable is an undefined term for a more specialised literary form occurring in the course of more general literature, such as a fable in the midst of a discourse, ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... where unhappily married men indemnify themselves for the appearance of monogamy by an association which can be ended at will? Whence come the mulattoes and the half-breeds of all sorts? Who so credulous as to believe the fable of monogamy? ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... 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 ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... hypnotism has recently given him an apperceiving mass for phenomena of this order, and he consequently now allows that the healings may exist, provided you expressly call them effects of "suggestion." Even the stigmata of the cross on Saint Francis's hands and feet may on these terms not be a fable. Similarly, the time-honored phenomenon of diabolical possession is on the point of being admitted by the scientist as a fact, now that he has the name of "hystero-demonopathy" by which to apperceive it. No one can foresee just how far this legitimation of occultist ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... ancient development of the world there came a time when there was danger of truth being corrupted and mingled with fable among those who did not follow the guidance of God, as did Abraham and the patriarchs; then the great lawgiver, Moses, was given the divine commission to make a written record of the creation of the world and of man and to transmit ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... Navy the sinking of the Lusitania means an extraordinary success. Its destruction demolished the last fable with which the people of England consoled themselves; on which hostile shipping relied when it dared to ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... country of the Turks and Russians. And last of all will come the end, when the Wahabites will carry all the Jews into hell-fire on their backs." Such are the secret consolations of a good and orthodox Mussulman of The Sahara. A part of this monstrous fable has been related before, with some variations. The gist of the prophecy is, the destruction of the Christians by another Arab Conqueror. Here the now humbled follower of the Prophet finds his sweet revenge. The same revenge the more ignorant and fanatic ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... the legends were first Hellenized and humanized, just as this must have been already far removed from the earliest stages of mythopoeic imagination. The reader of Aeschylus or Sophocles should therefore be warned against attributing to the poet's invention that which is given in the fable. ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... the chaos of that civil war had risen a new nation, mighty in the vastness of its limitless resources, the realities within its reach surpassing the dreams of fiction, and eclipsing the fancy of fable—a new nation, yet rosy in the flesh, with the bloom of youth upon its cheeks and the gleam of morning in its eyes. No one questioned that commercial and geographic union had been effected. So had Rome re-united its faltering provinces, maintaining the limit of its ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... is to marry me. Don't look like that, Aunt Sarah. It is true;—it is, indeed." She had now dragged her chair close to her aunt's seat upon the sofa, so that she could put her hands upon her aunt's knees. "All that about Miss Brownlow has been a fable." ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... one of the thirteen states of Yemen; and prodigious tales are told of its opulence, its mosques and minarets, its baths of jasper, and its crescents and colonnades. But Arabia is proverbially a land of fable, and the glories of Aden exhibit Arabian imagination in its highest stage. Possibly, while it continued a port for the Indian trade, it may have shared the wealth which India has always lavished on commerce. But a spot without ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... won't, I will take it—permission, To state, that I think there's a word to be said, From a different text, on the opposite head. And so I'll invent, as well as I'm able, A new home-made, allegorical fable; And my honest purpose shall be, to see If the scoundrel rich have not borne a part In those noble charities, which are The pride of this jolly old city's heart. And if I shall find that the virtuous mob Have ever been known one farthing to pay, Without ...
— Nothing to Say - A Slight Slap at Mobocratic Snobbery, Which Has 'Nothing - to Do' with 'Nothing to Wear' • QK Philander Doesticks
... mattered not that the sordidly battered lump proved to be an ingot of crude copper—probably portion of the ballast from some ancient wrecks—and that Truth was sulking down some very remote well when the fable of the golden sinker was invented. Ordinary men—men of the type whom Kinglake designated "Poor Mr. Reasonable Man"—men with common sense, in fact, the very commonest of sense—were not to be beguiled ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... of them a frightful monster ran across their path, which seemed so hideous to Martin, that his mind instantly reverted to the fable of Saint George and the Dragon, and he almost expected to see fire issuing from its mouth. It was a huge lizard, with a body about three feet long, covered with bright scales. It had a long, thick tail. Its head was clumsy ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... fable about a painter moved by Jove to the painting of the head of Medusa. Though the picture was true to the life, yet the poor artist sickened at the sight of what his forced pencil had drawn. Thus, borne through my task toward the end, my own ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... 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 young woman who had fled ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claim to praise. That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane—owes its popularity to the fact ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... themselves in opposition to the dominant tendencies of their times, pointing out the evils and dangers connected with them, and dwelling specially on neglected truths. It is not surprising that the first class are by far the most popular. The public is much like Narcissus in the fable, who fell in love with his own reflection in the water. All men like to find their own opinions expressed with a power and eloquence they cannot themselves attain, and most men dislike a writer who, in the first flush of a great enthusiasm, points out all ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... greater influx of thoughts in one hour at present than in a whole year under the reign of opium. It seems as though all the thoughts which had been frozen up for a decade of years by opium, had now, according to the old fable, been thawed at once, such a multitude stream in upon me from all quarters. Yet such is my impatience and hideous irritability, that for one which I detain and write down fifty escape me. In spite of my weariness from suffering and ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... book is presented to you as a token of esteem and gratitude. 10. The warrior fell back upon the bed a lifeless corpse. 11. The apple tastes and smells delicious. 12. Lord Darnley turned out a dissolute and insolent husband. 13. In the fable of the Discontented Pendulum, the weights hung speechless. 14. The brightness and freedom of the New Learning seemed incarnate in the young and scholarly Sir Thomas More. 15. Sir Philip Sidney lived and died the darling of the Court, and the gentleman ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... Muslims fable the devil to have tempted Abraham to disobey God's commandment to sacrifice Ishmael (Isaac) and to have been driven off by the Patriarch with stones. Hence he ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... is a fable, written to show that it is of no use to expect people to do things which they have not the power to do. The wolf could catch lambs, but he could not learn his letters. So my little Alice can dress dollies, but she does not know how ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... Story of Savages and Barbarians can contain nothing instructive, or entertaining, the Antemilesian Inhabitants of this Land having been mostly such, and all surviving Accounts of them almost totally overcast with Fable, we are therefore, in treating of the antient Scotia, or modern Ireland, to refer principally to three distinguished aeras, whereof the first is, its being peopled by an Iberian or Spanish Colony: ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... Poet's crime, it is a crime Of ignorance, and not a studied theft. Judge for yourselves! the fact is even thus. The Colax is a fable of Menander's; Wherein is drawn the character of Colax The parasite, and the vain-glorious soldier; Which characters, he scruples not to own, He to his Eunuch from the Greek transferr'd: But that he knew those pieces were before Made Latin, ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... save Nechayeff from being arrested by the Swiss authorities and sent back to Russia, defends him on precisely these grounds, claiming that Nechayeff had taken the fable of William Tell seriously. Cf. ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... were led into the ring, and one acted the gardener of the fable, went on a hunting trip, waltzed, took off its hat, and played dead. After this performance came the donkey. But it defended itself well; its kicks sent the dogs flying through the air like balloons; ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert |
