"Fable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Russia. An abundant cheap supply, firstly, of English and French books, in English and French, but in the Russian character, by means of which Russians may rapidly learn French and English—for it is quite a fable that these languages are known and used in Russia below the level of the court and aristocracy—and, secondly, of Russian books in the Latin (or some easy phonetic development of the Latin) type, will do more to facilitate interchange and intercourse between Russia and France, America and Britain, ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... poetry. His works in all were forty-four in number: and it is said that on the very day of his death (it took place in 735) he was dictating to his amanuensis, and had just completed a book. His works are wonderful for his time, and not the less interesting for a fine cobweb of fable which is woven over parts of them, and which seems in keeping with their venerable character. Thus, in speaking of the Magi who visited the infant Redeemer, he is very particular in describing their age, appearance, and offerings. Melchior, the first, was old, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... little, if any, of the faith of the operation of God in the hearts of poor men, to believe the Scriptures, and things contained in them. Many, yea, most men believe the Scriptures as they believe a fable, a story, a tale, of which there is no certainty! But alas! there are but few do in deed and in truth believe the Scriptures to be the very Word ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... A fable told by La Fontaine, Two centuries or more ago, Describes some rats who would arraign A cat, their direst foe, Who killed so many rats And caused the deepest woe, This ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... the breed, unless it crosses 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
... the world would call him so. Afy thought such an Adonis had never been coined, out of fable. He had shiny black hair and whiskers, dark eyes and handsome features. But his vain dandyism spoilt him; would you believe that his handkerchiefs were soaked in scent? They were of the finest cambric, ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... it. I am a child in these matters. I had only seen a chicken in its wild state once or twice before we came down here. I had never dreamed of being an active assistant on a real farm. The whole thing began like Mr. George Ade's fable of the author. An author—myself—was sitting at his desk trying to turn out something that could be converted into breakfast food, when a friend came in and sat down on the table and told him to go right ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... Pontine marshes, which lay spread out below as far 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, this being ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... 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
... poem—not its prose translation—were printed as headnotes on each page. For this e-text, only the line numbers of each complete "Fable" are given. Line numbers used in footnotes are retained from the original text; these, too, refer to the Latin poem and are independent of line divisions in ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... play 'Pygmalion and Galatea,' is a perversion of Ovid's fable of the Sculptor of Cyprus, the main interest of which upon the stage is derived from its cynical contrast between the innocence of the beautiful nymph of stone whom Pygmalion's love endows with life, and the conventional prudishness of society. ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... who was an ardent admirer of the fair sex, of which he had had but little experience, used to take upon himself, like a true French knight, to defend all the beauties that we were attacking so unmercifully. He would laughingly accuse the abbe of arguing about women as the fox in the fable argued about the grapes. For myself, I used to improve under the abbe's criticisms; this was an emphatic way of letting Edmee know how much I preferred her to all others. She, however, appeared to be more scandalized than flattered, and seriously reproved ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... Dardanus) has not come down, should we say that Dardanus while alive was a common peasant, and dead became noble? And this is not contradicted by the story that he was the son of Jupiter (for this is a fable, of which, in a philosophical discussion, we should take no heed); and yet if our opponent should wish to fall back on the fable, certainly that which is covered by the fable would ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... strong; indeed, her plainness was more than Quakerish, it was Spartan, she was totally destitute of the knicknacks so dear to the girlish heart, and though she had grown used to looking at grapes like Reynard in the fable, I am sure she often felt the sting of her grandfather's needless, almost cruel, economy. This was evidenced by what was ever after spoken of by us girls as the ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... we object to the whole plan and conception of the fable, as turning mainly upon incidents unsuitable for poetical narrative, and brought out in the denouement in a very obscure, laborious, and imperfect manner. The events of an epic narrative should all be ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... seemed to grow enormous bats' wings, which spread out until they obscured the whole sky. The ghostly figure resembled a wild creature of fable, born of the weird fancy of a Dore, or an avenging angel of the Apocalypse. Then the rider shrank together again and seemed to be bouncing up and down on the back of his horse like ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... has been indicated, children's literature is of two kinds: first, the traditional kind that grew up among the folk of long ago in the forms of rhyme, myth, fairy tale, fable, legend, and romantic hero story; and, second, the kind that has been produced in modern times by individual authors. The first, the traditional kind, was produced by early civilization and by the childlike peasantry of long ago. The best of the stories produced by ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... the Parable, and the Fable are all common and popular modes of conveying instruction. Each is distinguished by its own special characteristics. The Tale consists simply in the narration of a story either founded on facts, or created solely by the imagination, and not necessarily associated with the teaching of any ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... darkness; and it is doubtful whether we possess any of the twelve sorts known to the ancients, (Goguet, Origine des Loix, &c., part ii. l. ii. c. 2, art. 3.) In this war the Huns got, or at least Perozes lost, the finest pearl in the world, of which Procopius relates a ridiculous fable.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... enuf of 'em, an' I'd like to be home where I can be down onto the flat groun' an' not like to what's his name's coffin, what I heerd the boys speakin' about, what got hitched half way up to heaven an' stuck there. He's a fable feller, ov course; Mahomet, that's his name; there ain't never been no such doin's sence miracle days 'cept in the theayters an' them places. An' t'other night Miss Dodge, she asked me would I go to the opery, an' I says 'yes.' I was boun' to see all there was to ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... Origine and Use of Satire. The Excellency of Epic Satire above others, as adding Example to Precept, and animating by Fable and sensible Images. Epic Satire compar'd with Epic Poem, and wherein they differ: Of their Extent, Action, Unities, Episodes, and the Nature of their Morals. Of Parody: Of the Style, Figures, and Wit proper to this Sort of Poem, and the ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... wind in a fable, that strove which of them should take from the traveller his cloak, having like the wind tried rough, boisterous, violent means to our friends before, but in vain, resolved now to imitate the sun, and shine as ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... connected with this wreck made it an object of great awe to my boyish fancy; but in truth the whole neighborhood was full of fable and romance for me, abounding with traditions about pirates, hobgoblins, and buried money. As I grew to more mature years I made many researches after the truth of these strange traditions; for I have always been a curious ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... sacerdotal power is seldom firmly established without a struggle, the memory whereof is carefully preserved as a warning of the danger of incurring the divine wrath. A good example of such a myth is the fable of the rebellious Zuni fire-priest, who at the prayer of his orthodox brethren was destroyed with all his clan by a boiling torrent poured from the burning mountain, sacred to their order, by the avenging gods. Compare this with the story of Korah; and it is interesting to observe how the ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... answer that I do not believe any such power exists in creative nature, for I think that God reserves to himself this prerogative, as well as that of reading the hearts of men, or of granting wealth to those who have nothing; unless, that is to say, we are prepared to believe the Colchian fable concerning the renewal of AEson and the researches of the sibyl ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... heed of Erasmus. He treats theology as a fool's jest, and the Gospel as a fable good for ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... to 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. OEuvres, ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... another's ideas from the appropriation of another's phraseology, we have only to say that a literary man always knows when he is stealing. Whether found out or not, the process is belittling, and a man is through it blasted for this world and damaged for the next one. The ass in the fable wanted to die because he was beaten so much, but after death they changed his hide into a drum-head, and thus he was beaten more than ever. So the plagiarist is so vile a cheat that there is not much chance for him, living or dead. A minister who hopes to do good with each ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... 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
... at him in amazement, and assumed the idiotic expression which led many people to believe that the accident that had happened to him—exactly like that of the Duc d'Orleans, you know—was not a fable of his own invention; but he dared not make the slightest observation. Surely some one had changed his son-in-law. Was this really Risler, this tiger-cat, who bristled up at the slightest word and talked of nothing ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... reembarked. They gathered, too, from the signs of their savage visitors, that the wonderful land of Cibola, with its seven cities and its untold riches, was distant but twenty days' journey by water. In truth, it was on the Gila, two thousand miles off, and its wealth a fable. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... universally advocated, is to avoid drugs. The importance of this and its union with right exercise have been demonstrated in the impressive language of fable. ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... only career in which the maximum income is paid to the newest apprentice. It is the one calling in which at the beginning the only exertion is that of self-indulgence; all the prizes are at the commencement. It is the ever new embodiment of the old fable of the sale of the soul to the Devil. The tempter offers wealth, comfort, excitement, but in return the victim must sell her soul, nor does the other party forget to exact his due to the uttermost farthing. Human nature, ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... of the inconsistency of the human mind, that, having built his castle with so little view to durability, Walpole entailed the perishable possession with a degree of strictness, which would have been more fitting for a baronial estate. And that, too, after having written a fable entitled "The Entail," in consequence, of some one having asked him whether he did not intend to entail Strawberry Hill, and in ridicule of ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... the circle of initiated priests, the Hierophants of the sanctum sanctorum of the old temples, under the guise of religious fables, it may not be amiss to search for universal truths even under the patches of fiction's harlequinade. This fable about the Pleiades, the seven Sisters, Atlas, and Hercules exists identical in subject, though under other names, in the sacred Hindu books, and has likewise the same occult meaning. But then like the Ramayana ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... now especially sublime. The numerous deep gorges presented the appearance of lakes, on account of the dense vapors with which they were filled, and the pinnacles and crags to the South East, piled in inextricable confusion, resembling nothing so much as the giant cities of eastern fable. We were rapidly approaching the mountains in the South; but our elevation was more than sufficient to enable us to pass them in safety. In a few minutes we soared over them in fine style; and Mr. Ainsworth, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... 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 ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... 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; with its tail between its legs and its ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... Infallibility of Human Judgment," it occasioned an acquaintance between us. He took great notice of me, called on me often to converse on those subjects, carried me to the Horns, a pale alehouse in——Lane, Cheapside, and introduced me to Dr. Mandeville, author of the "Fable of the Bees," who had a club there, of which he was the soul, being a most facetious, entertaining companion. Lyons, too, introduced me to Dr. Pemberton, at Batson's Coffee-house, who promis'd to give me an opportunity, sometime or other, ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... sun accepted the wind's challenge to contest for the traveler's cloak, I dare say all the spectators of the novel highway robbery—the moon, the stars, the trees, birds and beasts, and others that the fable does not mention—took odds that the wind would snatch off the wayfarer's garment in triumph. However, the wind whipped and thrashed the poor man in vain. The stronger it blew and the more it walloped the cloak's folds, the tighter and more determinedly the ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... meadow—a brook that many a time has served to turn my water-wheel. Oh, those days of miniature water-wheels, and kites, and wind-mills! how happy they were, and how I love to think of them now! By the way, have you ever read Miss Gould's poetical fable about the little child and the Blue Violet? I must recite a stanza or two of this poem, I think. The child speaks ...
— Wreaths of Friendship - A Gift for the Young • T. S. Arthur and F. C. Woodworth
... an abounding sense of humor, and always employed it in illustration of his argument—but never for the mere sake of provoking merriment. In this respect he had the wonderful aptness of Franklin. He often taught a great truth with the felicitous brevity of an Aesop fable. His words did not flow in an impetuous torrent, as did those of Douglas; but they were always well ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... (significant only because of the Me in the centre), creeds, conventions fall away and become of no account before this simple idea. Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable, once liberated and look'd upon, it expands over the whole earth and spreads to the roof of heaven. The quality of BEING, in the object's self, according to its own central idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom and thereto—not criticism by other standards and adjustments ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... was only to show the party cantering by at an easy pace and looking as if they were engaged in some trial of skill, and in spite of the peril in which he was placed Chris's thoughts played a strange prank, suggesting to him the old fable of the boys and ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... of a woman so young and so lovely, Jacques Ferrand felt sometimes his mind wandering; a devouring imagery pursued him, waking or sleeping. The ancient fable of the Nessus' shirt was realized ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... faintly, 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. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of no use as a time-keeper if it should become discouraged and come to a standstill by calculating its work a year ahead, as the clock did in Jane Taylor's fable. It is not the troubles of to-day, but those of to-morrow and next week and next year, that whiten our heads, wrinkle our faces, and bring us to ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... brief report of Brother John Kline's sermon on this occasion I have but touched some of the points in his argument, gathered from the Diary, and from a personal conversation with him afterwards. He wound up with the Fable of the Clock and ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... and of herself. She did not invoke God, we very well know, but she had faith in the genius of evil—that immense sovereignty which reigns in all the details of human life, and by which, as in the Arabian fable, a single pomegranate seed is sufficient to reconstruct ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... his Northern crowds the fable of negro suffering in the South until he believed the lie himself. He believed it with every beat of his stern Puritan heart. And he had repeated and shouted it until the gathering Abolitionist mob believed it as a message from God. The fact that the system of African slavery, as actually ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... to the newly-discovered country. The later voyages of Thorwald Ericsson, of Thorlstein Ericsson—both brothers of Leif—and of Thorfinn Karlsefne, are recounted in the Sagas. The story of these early colonists or "builders," as they called themselves, is weakened by an infusion of fable, such as the tale of the fast-running one-legged people; but with all allowances, the fact of Viking adventure on the American mainland is unquestioned and unquestionable, though we may say of these brave sailors, with Professor ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... favour, our Country pastime made is. We are a few of those collected here, That ruder Tongues distinguish villager; And to say veritie, and not to fable, We are a merry rout, or else a rable, Or company, or, by a figure, Choris, That fore thy dignitie will dance a Morris. And I, that am the rectifier of all, By title Pedagogus, that let fall The Birch upon the breeches of the small ones, And humble with a Ferula the tall ones, Doe here present ...
— The Two Noble Kinsmen • William Shakespeare and John Fletcher [Apocrypha]
... discourse is neatly illustrative of a neoclassic critical method and of the kind of psychological assumptions upon which such arguments could proceed. From the rather copious use of allegory and metaphor, as civilizing instruments, Ogilvie traces the rise of the religious fable as part of the inevitable sequence of imaginative development. To account, therefore, for the irregularity of the ode, for the "enthusiasm, obscurity and exuberance" (p. xxiv) which continue to characterize it, he refers to its anciently established character, a character not susceptible ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... to extend itself over the whole earth, make the working classes restless and discontented. They chafe under restraints as unavoidable as illness or death. What floods of nonsense have we not seen poured out about the conflict between labor and capital? It is the old fable over again: the strife of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... possibility avoid casting its lot with one side or the other, it should cast it with the North. For many weeks the two Presidents played the game for this invaluable stake with all the tact and skill of which each was master. It proved to be a repetition of the fable of the sun and the wind striving to see which could the better make the traveler take off his cloak, and fortunately the patience of Mr. Lincoln represented the warmth of the sun. He gave the Kentuckians time to learn by observation and the march of events that neutrality was an impossibility, ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... plaster has got to be removed before the fatal day of her return," and puffed until his cheeks sank in, and the tears came to his eyes. "What is this quail fable, anyway?" ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck
... shall not contradict this delightful tradition, But beg—No, I 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 ...
— Nothing to Say - A Slight Slap at Mobocratic Snobbery, Which Has 'Nothing - to Do' with 'Nothing to Wear' • QK Philander Doesticks
... I substituted. "But you have your own stand-point of view, of course. The shield that to you is white, to me is black as Erebus. You remember the knights of fable?" ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... resolve into distempered fancies, identified the enigmatical Margrave. And now both she, the representative of the formal world most opposed to visionary creeds, and he, who gathered round him all the terrors which haunt the realm of fable, stood united against me,—foes with whom the intellect I had so haughtily cultured knew not how to cope. Whatever assault I might expect from either, I was unable to assail again. Alike, then, in this, are the Slander and the Phantom,—that which appalls us most in their power over us ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and held only by an act of faith. Yet that astonishing revelation, enough to make any youthful messenger forget where he himself was bound, through turning to follow with his eyes that acceptance by a carrier's cart of the verity of the fable, is nowhere mentioned, I have found since, in any guide to London, though you may learn how ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... accustomed current when, in his early life, he wrote a work in their defence. The theory that errors of transcription might possibly have crept into the text, was totally rejected. No such thing could, by any contingency, occur. The fable of Aristeas was still considered worthy a place in the canon. The sanctity of the Hebrew language, and other Rabbinical notions, were defended. Christ was discovered in every book of the Old Testament; the perfect ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... every play, from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his commentators... Let him read on through brightness and obscurity, through integrity and corruption; let him preserve his comprehension of the dialogue and his interest in the fable. And when the pleasures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness and read ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... 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
... Victoria, unconsciously repeating his words. "But that doesn't explain you," she exclaimed: "You are like nobody I ever met, and you have a supernatural faculty of appearing suddenly, from nowhere, and whisking me away like the lady in the fable, out of myself and the world I live in. If I become so inordinately grateful as to talk nonsense, you mustn't blame me. Try not to think of the number of times I've seen you, or when it was ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... you to follow me in spirit to the very home and birth-place of freedom, to the land where we need not myth or fable to add aught to the fresh and gladdening feeling with which we for the first time tread the soil and drink the air of the immemorial democracy of Uri. It is one of the opening days of May: it is the morning of Sunday; for men then deem ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... fable, Painted hopes and portent sable, Then an opener wisdom finding, Let thy round and wintry sun Chase the lurid vapour, blinding Souls ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... Such as are beautiful for Colour. A strange Bird. Water-Fowls resembling Ducks and Swans. Peacocks. The King keeps Fowl. Their Fish, How they catch them in Ponds, And how in Rivers. Fish kept and fed for the King's Pleasure. Serpents. The Pimberah of a prodigious bigness. The Polonga. The Noya. The Fable of the Noya ana Polonga. The Carowala. Gerendo. Hickanella. Democulo, a great Spider. Kobbera-guson, a Creature like an Aligator. Tolla-guion. The people eat Rats. Precoius Stones, Minerals, and other Commodities. The People ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... "The demon of curiosity has a hold of you, Molly; remember the fable they made us repeat: De loin c'est quelque chose, et de pres ce n'est rien. Now you shall go straight into your bed, ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... terrae filius or son of the earth, who was strong only when his foot was on the earth, lifted in air he became weak as water, a weakness which Hercules discovered to his discomfiture when wrestling with him. The fable has been used as a symbol of the spiritual strength which accrues when one rests his faith on the immediate fact ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... gives to every man Some gift serviceable; Write I never could nor can Hungry at the table; Fasting, any stripling to Vanquish me is able; Hunger, thirst, I liken to Death that ends the fable. ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... scruples on the score of giving up his profession and thereby losing all chance of ever attaining to the dignity of Lord Chancellor, he certainly kept them to himself, for he had no wish to run counter to the inclination of Kate, or he might find himself in the position of the dog in the fable, who had thrown away the substance to endeavour to grasp the shadow. Tom, in reality, had never liked a London life, and had a constant hankering after field sports, shooting and fishing; and now he believed ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... comes on the stage of human affairs, the fable of the Hercules repeats itself. He gets a sword from Mercury, a bow from Apollo, a breastplate from Vulcan, a robe from Minerva. Many streams from many sources bring to him their united strength. How else ...
— Charles Sumner Centenary - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 14 • Archibald H. Grimke
... restrained her fury, until she recovered the love-letter she had written to me. As soon as she had secured it, she hired some persons to testify by oath, that, in the absence of his Excellency, I had attempted to violate her. This fable was represented with so much art and speciousness, that the president did not doubt its truth, and I was ordered to be put in prison. In this, my despairing condition, I saw no other means of deliverance than to confess the crime, with which I had been charged, and supplicate the president ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... they will always be reduced to act, as the Grecian chiefs did, according to the best of their convictions. Nevertheless, for the satisfaction of those who distrust romance and insist upon reality, we will leave fable for fact, and take as our next illustration an incident that may any ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... inch Italian and Neapolitan. Her youth had been all love, and her age was all superstition. She was garrulous, fond,—a gossip. Now she would prattle to the girl of cavaliers and princes at her feet, and now she would freeze her blood with tales and legends, perhaps as old as Greek or Etrurian fable, of demon and vampire,—of the dances round the great walnut-tree at Benevento, and the haunting spell of the Evil Eye. All this helped silently to weave charmed webs over Viola's imagination that afterthought and later years might labour vainly to dispel. And all ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the old fable of The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. We will vouch that the following read us as luminous a comment thereon as may be desired: 'Polite,' 'urbane,' 'civil,' 'rustic,' 'villain,' 'savage,' 'pagan,' 'heathen.' Let ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... with all that rebellious self, over which the poor soul rules as it may, and rules so poorly? Oh! there is an inner unrest, the necessary fate of every man who does not take Christ for his King. But when He enters the heart with His silken leash, the old fable comes true, and He binds the lions and the ravenous beasts there with its slender tie and leads them along, tamed, by the cord of love, and all harnessed to pull together in the chariot that He guides. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... the American girl is neither an affectation, nor a prejudiced fable, nor a piece of stupidity. The German woman, quoted by Mr. Bryce, found her American compeer furchtbar frei, but she had at once to add und furchtbar fromm. "The innocence of the American girl passes abysses of obscenity without stain or ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Verbe eternel de sortir de son repos mais comme c'etoit par la Vierge Marie qu'il avoit voulu descendre parmi les hommes et se mettre en leur puissance, on croyoit ne pouvoir mieux faire que de choisir dans la fable, le fait d'une pucelle pouvant seule servir de piege a la licorne, en l'attirant par le charme et le parfum de son sein virginal qu'elle lui presentoit; enfin l'ange Gabriel concourant au mystere etoit bien reconnoissable sous les traits du venenr aile ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... corner 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 ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... Callao was completely overwhelmed by the sea. Several travellers have related that on calm days with a clear sky the old town may be seen beneath the waves. I have also heard the same story from inhabitants of Callao. It is doubtless a mere fable. Under the most favorable circumstances I have often examined the spot—the Mar brava, as it is called—without being able to discover a trace of the ruins ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... for a Time only; is a 'Time-phantasm, yet reckons itself real!' The Merovingian Kings, slowly wending on their bullock-carts through the streets of Paris, with their long hair flowing, have all wended slowly on,—into Eternity. Charlemagne sleeps at Salzburg, with truncheon grounded; only Fable expecting that he will awaken. Charles the Hammer, Pepin Bow-legged, where now is their eye of menace, their voice of command? Rollo and his shaggy Northmen cover not the Seine with ships; but have sailed ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... overproduction. The "avalanch of nuts" is an old wife's fable. Do not talk to us about overproduction, when the food problem is giving the gravest concern to the master minds of the world. With population increasing and food supply diminishing the gaunt specter of ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... properly so called, depends on the recognition of the order and awe of lower and loftier animal life, first clearly taught in the myth of Chiron, and in his bringing up of Jason, AEsculapius, and Achilles, but most perfectly by Homer, in the fable of the horses of Achilles, and the part assigned to them, in relation to the death of his friend, and in prophecy of his own. There is, perhaps, in all the "Iliad," nothing more deep in significance—there is nothing in all literature more perfect in human ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... most remote antiquity; and granting that ages of ignorance and superstition have involved the history of the different constellations in a chaos of contradictory traditions, there is no doubt at the foundation some seeds of truth which may even yet emerge from the rubbish of fable, and bear fruit most precious. That the zodial[23] signs are significant records of something worthy of being preserved, is prejudice to deny; and we must be allowed to regard the Gorgons and Hydras of the skies as interesting problems yet unsolved, ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... whole, my view of the operations of the Colonization Society, in relieving the slave States of the evil which weighs them down more than a hundred tariffs, is illustrated by an old fable, in which it is stated, that a man was seen at the foot of a mountain, scraping away the dust with his foot. One passing by, asked him what he was doing? I wish to remove this mountain, said he. You fool, replied the other, you can never do it in that ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... "Is this a fable or the posy of a ring, Sir Dragon?" she said, sharply. "Do you come to try or tempt me, or is this perchance but some part of my Lord of Misrule's Yule-tide mumming? 'Sblood, sir; only cravens sneak behind masks to strike and threaten. Have off your ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... fable, he expresses no opinion as to the merits of the controversy between the Red-faced Man and the Hare that, without search on his own part, presented itself to his mind in so odd a fashion. It is one on which anybody interested in such matters ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... criticizing this antithesis at present, but evidently it is quite different from the other. It is practically the distinction used in the old-fashioned criticism of epic and drama, and it flows down, not unsullied, from Aristotle. Addison, for example, in examining Paradise Lost considers in order the fable, the characters, and the sentiments; these will be the substance: then he considers the language, that is, the style and numbers; this will be the form. In like manner, the substance or meaning of a lyric may ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... she began, "La Ligue des Rats: fable de La Fontaine." She then declaimed the little piece with an attention to punctuation and emphasis, a flexibility of voice and an appropriateness of gesture, very unusual indeed at her age, and which proved she had been ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... Where the greatest pains have been lavished on that sort of research, little knowledge has been gained; and the most diligent inquirers have been compelled either to confess that they were baffled, or rather than own their disappointment, to substitute fable for fact, and pass the fictions ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... the Persian fable—the pebble that was not the rose, but had caught some of its fragrance by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... settlers been so strong handed, the work now accomplished could not have been performed before the winter; but it was the fable of the bundle of sticks exemplified. Such a building would not have been attempted except for the sake of the ladies, as the settlers would have employed all their strength in preparing the ground for cultivation. That necessary proceeding was not ...
— The Log House by the Lake - A Tale of Canada • William H. G. Kingston
... far as our consciousness is concerned, things are merely groups of actual and potential reactions on our own part, that is to say of expectations which experience has linked together in more or less stable groups. The practical man and the man of science in my fable, were both of them dealing with Things: passing from one group of potential reaction to another, hurrying here, dallying there, till of the actual aspect of the landscape there remained nothing in their thoughts, trams ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... which you performed 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 records of ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... The Fable. The King of Navarre and his three courtiers, Biron, Dumaine and Longaville, have sworn to study for three years under the usual collegiate conditions of watching, fasting, and keeping from the sight and speech of women. They are forced to break ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... maiden-hair have been steeped, as good raise mirth and jollity in the guests (in imitation of Homer's Helen, who with some medicament diluted the pure wine she had prepared), do not understand that that fable, coming from round Egypt, after a long way ends at last in easy and fit discourse. For whilst they were drinking Helen ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... imposture runs a golden thread of truth. As his first journey, occupying nearly two of the three volumes, was probably confined to the Valley of the Cuanza River, so his second, extending beyond the equator, and to a meridian 25deg. east of Paris, becomes fable as he leaves the course of the Loge Stream. Yet, although he begins by doubting that the Coango and the Zaire are the same waters, he ends by recognizing the fact, and his map justly lays down the Fleuve Couango dit Zaire a son embouchure. Whether the tale of the mulatto surveyor be fact or ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... 20, says that both the spring and the remains of the tree were shown in his time. The whole of this fable has been translated into verse by Cicero, de Div. ii. 30. Compare the following passage of Apuleius de Deo Socr. p. 52, ed. Elm. "Calchas longe praestabilis ariolari, simul alites et arborem contemplatus est, actutum sua divinitate ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... 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, many had made use of it as well as of ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... greatest curiosity in the collection was that of three portraits belonging to the pre-historical age, and, according to mythical tradition, taken by the orders of a philosopher, whose origin and attributes were as much mixed up with symbolical fable as those of an Indian Budh or ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the weak in intellect." They "hurry away from the educated, as not fit subjects of their imposition, and inveigle the rustic." "Thou," says the heathen magistrate to the martyr Fructuosus, "who as a teacher dost disseminate a new fable, that fickle girls may desert the groves and abandon Jupiter, condemn, if thou art wise, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... burst forth, "that we all know, and you know that we all know, is but a fable. Doth not Madam Cavendish treat you as a son, and are you not a convict in name only, so far as she is concerned? I say, Harry, you can ride my horse to the winning on Royal Oak Day, at the races. What ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... truths of the latest researches be given first. Then the fable, or folklore, or former explanation which once vouched for the origin of the sun, moon, or stars, or other natural objects, seems to the children like their own childish fancies about ...
— Classic Myths • Retold by Mary Catherine Judd
... 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 dolphins, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... Posterity has taken Raleigh's view, and all Englishmen, from Lord Bacon to Lord Tennyson, have united in praising this fight as one 'memorable even beyond credit, and to the height of some heroical fable.' ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... The fable about a Prince of Baden had not a single shred of evidence in its favour. It is true that the Grand Duchess was too ill to be permitted to see her dead baby, in 1812, but the baby's father, grandmother, ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... 1868.—The Arabs have some tradition of the Emir Musa coming as far south as the Jagga country. Some say he lived N.E. of Sunna, now Mteza; but it is so mixed up with fable and tales of the Genii (Mageni), that it cannot refer to the great Moses, concerning whose residence at Meroee and marriage of the king of Ethiopia's daughter there is also some vague tradition further north: the only thing ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... meaning. Jocasta was no other than Miss Esmond, Maid of Honor to her Majesty. She had told Mr. Esmond this little story of having met a gentleman somewhere, and forgetting his name, when the gentleman, with no such malicious intentions as those of "Cymon" in the above fable, made the answer simply as above; and we all laughed to think how little Mistress Jocasta-Beatrix had profited by her ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... as you did, and letting that brother of mine get away sneering and sniggering at me, with his nose cocked up in the air, and swelling with pride till he's like the frog in the fable." ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... course of 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 ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... time a thing happened in Skane which created a good deal of discussion and even got into the newspapers but which many believed to be a fable, because they had not ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... apples at him, but they had no more effect upon the culprit than did the grass upon the bad boy in the fable; so the farmer got a long pole and prodded the apple thief until he whined and came scratching down ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... inspired them to eloquent expression of the thoughts, the loves, the hopes, and the aspirations which were our own as well as theirs, these writers of our South are living still and will live through the long procession of the years. In the garden of our lives they planted the flowers of poesy, of fable, and of romance. With the changes of the years those flowers may have passed into the realm of the old-fashioned, like the blossoms in Grandmother's garden, but are there any sweeter or ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... construction, were scattered here and there, the homes of peasant and Peruvian noble. But it was upon the temple crowning a near elevation that the eye would rest, in rapt astonishment at its magnificence and grandeur. The description may sound like a scrap from some eastern fable, but none the less it is a fact culled from the ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... low opinion of poetry, the neo-Aristotelians among the critics began to stress the view that fable, design, and structure were the really essential elements in poetry, and that these were the product of reason, or judgment. And because reason was the means by which truth was discovered, poetry by virtue of its rational framework became capable ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... amber moon Illumines footing on forbidden wall; Where, 'stead of pursy jeweler's display, Parading peacocks brave the passer-by, And swans like angels in an azure sky Wing swift and silent on unchallenged way. No land of fable! Of the Hills I sing, Whose royal women tread with conscious grace The peace-filled gardens of a warrior race, Each maiden fit for wedlock with a king, And every Rajput son so royal born And conscious of his age-long heritage He looks askance at Burke's ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... Orleans Princes, was 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 ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... impossible to know. But the Hebrews received the Mysteries from the Egyptians; and of course were familiar with their legend,—known as it was to those Egyptian Initiates, Joseph and Moses. It was the fable (or rather the truth clothed in allegory and figures) of OSIRIS, the Sun, Source of Light and Principle of Good, and TYPHON, the Principle of Darkness and Evil. In all the histories of the Gods and Heroes lay couched and hidden astronomical details and the history of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... those who have not seen and yet have believed—those who trust in him more than that—who believe without the sight of the eyes, without the hearing of the ears. They are blessed to whom a wonder is not a fable, to whom a mystery is not a mockery, to whom a glory is not an unreality—who are content to ask, "Is it like Him?" It is a dull-hearted, unchildlike people that will be always putting God in mind of his promises. Those promises are good to reveal what God is; ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... many of you do not see that the same is true when you deal with good chemists or electricians belonging to the astral or mental planes. They have no more authority qua their knowledge of these planes than the chemist. I often wish that in the Theosophical Society the old fable of the Jewish Rabbis was better remembered and applied. Two Rabbis were arguing, and one of them, to support his side of the argument, made a wall fall down; whereupon the other Rabbi sensibly remarked: "Since when ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... curiosity and speculation than that of George Eliot. Had she only lived earlier in the century she might easily have become the centre of a mythos. As it is, many of the anecdotes commonly repeated about her are made up largely of fable. It is, therefore, well, before it is too late, to reduce the true story of her career to the lowest terms, and this service has been well done by the author of ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... essentials in children's books if your selection must be small? Our children can grow up without Henty. They must not grow up without the classics in myth and fable and legend, the books which have delighted grown people and adults for generations, and upon the child's early acquaintance with which depends his keen enjoyment of much of his later reading, because of the wealth of ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... it), I found none so fit as he who peopled the beautiful and far-famed city of Athens, to be set in opposition with the father of the invincible and renowned city of Rome. Let us hope that Fable may, in what shall follow, so submit to the purifying processes of Reason as to take the character of exact history. We shall beg that we may meet with candid readers, and such as will receive with indulgence the ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... earth, yielded up her mighty whales, that Mr. Gathergold might sell their oil, and make a profit on it. Be the original commodity what it might, it was gold within his grasp. It might be said of him, as of Midas in the fable, that whatever he touched with his finger immediately glistened, and grew yellow, and was changed at once into sterling metal, or, which suited him still better, into piles of coin. And, when Mr. Gathergold had become so very ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... the panic. I am such a butterfly that I seem out of place in a work-a-day community. I am constantly advised, like the volatile person in the fable, to learn wisdom from my aunt; but I can't, for the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... put such silly nonsense into your head? Don't let that stupid fable hide from you the beautiful truth of birth. That is an absurd story, Zoe, invented by those to whom the most sublime fact in the world seems nasty. Babies are born, dear—out of lo—out of the union of ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... of Circe, who changed the soldiers or companions of Ulysses into swine. We know also the fable of the Golden Ass, by Apuleius, which contains the account of a man metamorphosed into an ass. I bring forward these things merely as what they are, that is to say, ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... Consciences: and yet will they not cease? Doth the Innocent, forbeare the calling of them, Iuridically to aunswere him, according to the rigour of the Lawes: and will they despise his Charitable pacience? As they, against him, by name, do forge, fable, rage, and raise slaunder, by Worde & Print: Will they prouoke him, by worde and Print, likewise, to Note their Names to the World: with their particular deuises, fables, beastly Imaginations, and vnchristen-like slaunders? Well: Well. O (you such) my vnkinde Countrey men. O vnnaturall Countrey ...
— The Mathematicall Praeface to Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara • John Dee
... "In realising the fable of the boys and the frogs with the poor old Dominie, forgetting that what may be sport to you ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... humorous rhyme "did it—quiddit" is but one of the many whimsical rhyming effects in the poem. The use of a light, semi-jocose form to give the greater emphasis to serious subject-matter is characteristic of Browning. Lowell in "A Fable for ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... off into dreamland, 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, if any of ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... so much of fable mingled with the traditionary biography of this "Devonshire worthy," that most persons probably will dismiss the claim altogether. He became weary of his life, and, being determined to rid himself from the direful apprehensions of dangerous approaching evils, he adopted this strange ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... pounds, and which, by the by, lamed him for several days. But he was heroic as the singer who broke his collar-bone by the ut di petto. A peculiar accompaniment was a dulcet whistle with lips protruded; hence probably the fable of Pliny's Astomoi, and the Africans of Eudoxus, whose joined lips compelled them to eat a single grain at a time, and to drink through a cane before sherry-cobblers were known. Others joined him, dancing either vis-a-vis or by his side; and more than ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... three times as 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 Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... by way of Prose, I shall only now give the Reformer a little further Advice, in return of his, in my Lyrical way, which is in a Fable of A Dog and an Otter; and to turn his own words upon him, the Citation may possibly be of some service to him, for if not concern'd in the Application, he may at least be precaution'd by the Moral. I find he knows ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... receive, And that we in the sacrament believe. Then, said the Hind, as you the matter state, Not only Jesuits can equivocate; For real, as you now the word expound, From solid substance dwindles to a sound. Methinks an AEsop's fable you repeat; You know who took the shadow for the meat: Your Church's substance thus you change at will, 50 And yet retain your former figure still. I freely grant you spoke to save your life; For then you lay ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... his absorption in business it had been easy for him to miss what lay beneath the surface. But for the accident of his meeting with Clara, his temperament would have carried him through life, unconscious of love from his own experience and regarding it as a fable of ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... unfortunate (?) King has named a host of things, alive and dead. It was worshipped and mummified in parts of Ancient Egypt e.g. Heracleopolis, on account of its antipathy to serpents and because it was supposed to destroy the crocodile, a feat with AElian and others have overloaded with fable. It has also a distinct antipathy to cats. The ichneumon as a pet becomes too tame and will not leave its master: when enraged it emits an offensive stench. I brought home for the Zoological ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... first. He said that he prayed, when alone in the turret, but omits the statement (previously made by him) that he deprived Ruthven of his dagger, a very improbable tale, told falsely at first, no doubt, as Robertson the notary at first invented his fable about meeting with Henderson, coming out of the dark staircase. This myth Robertson narrated when examined in September, but omitted it in the trial in November. Henderson now explained about his first opening the wrong window, but he sticks to it that ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... wish. Lastly—though this is a matter of less moment—if any of our politicians, who used to make their calculations and conjectures according to persons and precedents, must needs interpose his judgment in a thing of this nature, I would but remind him how (according to the ancient fable) the lame man keeping the course won the race of the swift man who left it; and that there is no thought to be taken about precedents, for the thing ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... but in their own forms, as in appetite of lust appeared. And the heresy of the Anthropomorphites was ever censured for a gross conceit bred in the obscure cells of solitary monks that never looked abroad. Again the fable so well known of QUIS PINXIT LEONEM, doth set forth well that there is an error of pride and partiality, as well as of custom and familiarity. The reflexion also from glasses so usually resembled to the imagery of the mind, every man knoweth ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... of their expositions, he reserved his own opinion to himself, and commanding that all these notions should be concealed from me, he ordered the interpreter to ask me what it meant. I answered, that it was an invention of the painter, to shew his art, and that it represented some poetical fable, which was all I could say, having never seen it before. He then called upon Mr Terry to give his opinion, who could not; on which the king asked him, why he brought up with him an invention in which he was ignorant? On this I interposed, saying Mr Terry ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... not to mind it. Few envy the consideration enjoyed by the oldest inhabitant. We do not count a man's years, until he has nothing else to count. The vast inconvenience of animal immortality was told in the fable of Tithonus. In short, the creed of the street is, Old Age is not disgraceful, but immensely disadvantageous. Life is well enough, but we shall all be glad to get out of it, and they will all be glad ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... agree with the majority. But, as the question cannot be ignored, I should like to say that I hold firmly the conviction that all trade should be carried on for the mutual advantage of the parties engaged. The old fable of AEsop may be quoted, which relates to a quarrel between the different members of the body. Every one of us can be, and should be, helpful to every other, independent of nation, country, and creed. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Bishop of Avranches supposes That all these large and varying doses Of fable mean naught else ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... what is't you read— Romance or fairy fable? Or is it some historic page Of kings and crowns unstable?' The young boy gave an upward glance— 'It is the ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... find that it is written with such an easy air of truth that you will half believe in Sir John's marvels. Every now and again, too, he puts in a bit of real information which helps to make his marvels seem true, so that sometimes we cannot be sure what is truth and what is fable. ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall |
