"Parable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ago a strange parable of what I mean. I was walking through a quiet countryside with a curious, fanciful, interesting boy, and we came to a little church off the track in a tiny churchyard full of high-seeded grasses. On the wall of the chancel hung an old trophy of armour, a helmet and a cuirass, black with age. The ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... against the sanity and authority of the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... literature we have, springing from this principle of comparison, the forms fable, parable, and allegory; and in language the figures of speech which we know as simile ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... Nature is a parable of God. In each of her forms we have a revelation of God. Not so complete as that given through the mind of prophets, or the life of Jesus Christ, but still a revelation of the Divine. Each natural object, ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... not remember the exact number. It was between one hundred and ninety-five and two hundred. Think of one pod scattering that number of seeds! Think again of the number of pods on one milkweed plant! It is staggering, is it not? To be sure we can remember the parable of the sower and have some hope, for some seed may fall on soil in which they ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... and flows toward the finite—that is the True, the Good; it is subject to laws, definite in form. Its echo which returns towards the Infinite is Beauty and Joy; which are difficult to touch or grasp, and so make us beside ourselves. This is what I tried to say by way of a parable or a song in The Echo. That the result was not clear is not to be wondered at, for neither was the ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... some of the effects of this distinguishing grace. There are several kinds of faith spoken of in the Bible. In one case, men are said to "believe for a while." This faith is shown us in the parable taught by our blessed Saviour, in the characters represented by the seed sown upon the rock, "which for a while believe, and in time of temptation ...
— A Narrative of The Life of Rev. Noah Davis, A Colored Man. - Written by Himself, At The Age of Fifty-Four • Noah Davis
... be the reason, think you, why Christ should so easily take a denial of the great ones, that were the grandeur of the world, and struggle so hard for hedge-creepers and highwaymen (as that parable, Luke xiv., seems to import he doth), but to show forth the riches of the glory of his grace to his praise? This I say, is one ...
— The Jerusalem Sinner Saved • John Bunyan
... Greek antithesis of soul and body, spirit and matter (cf. Irenaeus i. 24 s. 5: animae autem eorum solam esse salutem, corpus enim natura corruptibile existit). The fundamental dualism of Basilides is confirmed also by one or two other passages. In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Basilides saw the proof of naturam sine radice et sine loco rebus supervenientem (Acta Archelai). According to Clemens, Strom. iv. 12 s. 83, &c., Basilides taught that even those who have not sinned in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... threatens what He does not mean to inflict. But how utterly this seems to me opposed to the gospel of Christ! All Christ's references to eternal punishment may be resolved into references to the Valley of Hinnom, by way of imagery; with the exception of the Dives parable, where is distinctly inferred a moral amendment beyond the grave. I speak of the unselfish desire of Dives to save his brothers. The more I see of the controversy, the more baseless does the eternal punishment theory appear. It seems then, to me, that instead of feeling aggrieved and shaken, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... looked about him, his strong face working with mingled passion and pleasure. Phil was somehow reminded of a story, heard in the long ago, a parable about the lord of the vineyard, who sent his son to treat with those in possession; and what those unruly spirits did to the young man was so vividly impressed on his mind right now, that it gave him a very uncomfortable feeling. ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... the day from out the basement and cellar rooms of the synagogue where it had been seated for a thousand years drugging itself with rabbinical lore, refining almost maniacally upon the intention of some obscure phrase or parable, negating the lure of the world and of experience with a mass of rites and observances and ceremonials, losing itself in the gray desert stretches of theory, or wasting itself in the impossible dream of Zion restored in modern Palestine and Solomon's temple rebuilt in ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... we suppose this interview betwixt Mistress Hibbins and Hester Prynne to be authentic, and not a parable—was already an illustration of the young minister's argument against sundering the relation of a fallen mother to the offspring of her frailty. Even thus early had the child saved her from ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... remit a claim due to us by one who is free and our equal, that may not invalidate or affect his claim on his neighbour—no matter whether that claim be larger or smaller than the one we remitted. But what did our SAVIOUR intend to teach us by the parable of Matthew xviii. 23-35? There the King and Master and Owner of a slave remits His claim in clemency and pity (and does so, as our LORD elsewhere clearly shows, on express condition of His servant's forgiving as he is forgiven—Matthew ...
— A Ribband of Blue - And Other Bible Studies • J. Hudson Taylor
... sat by the sea of Galilee, he told the people the parable of the Sower. The sower cast some seed by the wayside, that is, along the edge of the field or road-side. Some seed fell upon stony ground, some among thorns, and ...
— Light On the Child's Path • William Allen Bixler
... products of our schools may be traced, in a large measure, to our irrational and fictitious procedure in the matter of grading. We must keep records, of course, but it will be recalled that in the parable of the talents men were commended or condemned according to the use they made of the talents they had and were not graded according to a fixed standard. Seeing that seventy-five per cent will win him promotion, the boy devotes only so much ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... had no keener vision for the world outside herself than before. She saw nothing of that diabolical thing which her father and madame had been so long plotting as the outcome of their friendship, the parable of which her education had been the text. If her intelligence was warping out from the narrow limits in which her mother had confined it, it was still below the average—as much as her feverish love and tenacious loyalty were above. All that she ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... as much as they get. But how can they bring themselves to pose as the representatives of a creed, which, as they themselves expound it, is based upon humility, poverty, and self-denial? Not one of them who would not quote with approval the parable of the Wedding Guest. But try putting one of them out of their due precedence at the next Court reception. It happened some little time ago with a Cardinal, and England rang with his protests. How blind not to see how they would spring at one leap into the real first ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... her workshops and bringing back raw material for her factories and looms. Wealth accumulated, London became the money market of the world, the riches and prosperity of the island kingdom were growing to be a parable among the nations ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... degradation. Without some degree of external order and obedience to the laws of natural life, it is, I hold, next to impossible, to plant in the mind any seeds of spiritual truth. There is no ground there. The parable of the sower that went forth to sow illustrates this law. Only the seed that fell on good ground brought forth fruit. Our true work, then, among this heathen people, of whom the churches take so little care, is first to get the ground in order for the planting, ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... writes for himself under that character which, once taken up by Jacob Behmen, is never for one day laid down. Behmen's favourite Scripture, after our Lord's promise of the Holy Spirit to them that ask for Him, was the parable of the Prodigal Son. In all his books Behmen is that son, covered with wounds and bruises and putrefying sores, but at last beginning to come to himself and to return to his Father. The Way to Christ is a production of the very ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... our earthly idols do fall and crush us, else we might go on to perdition in our fatal idolatry. Yes, my child, it is well that your idol has fallen, even though you lie buried and bleeding under its ruins; for our fraternity, like the good Samaritan of the parable, will raise you up and dress your wounds, and set you on your feet again, and lead you in the right path—the path of peace ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... this chase, in which they might have read a parable of their own affair, sweep past them like a bad dream. In the dead hush that followed they heard what was a good deal more significant for them, ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... charming vein of parable, the author of Pelham may be likened to Beau Tibbs. Tibbs, as we all remember, would pass for a pink of fashion, and had a wife whom he presented to the world as a paragon of virtue and ton, and who was but the cast-off mistress of a lord. Mr. Bulwer's philosophy is his Mrs. Tibbs; he ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... fleerin'," he replied. "What I'm tellin' you is t' truth, or if it isn't' truth it's a parable, and I reckon a parable's Bible truth. It were gettin' on towards back-end, and I'd bin diggin' potatoes while I were in a fair sweat wi' t' heat. So I reckoned I'd just sit down for a bit on t' bench I'd made an' rest misen. Efter a while I gat agate once more, an' ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... found frequent occasion for caustic wit. He lashed the age for its love of the "swine's trough," of "Pig-science, Pig-enthusiasm and devotion." Although his intentions were good, his satire was not always just or discriminating, and he was in consequence bitterly criticized. The following Dutch parable is in some ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... sad end to what might have been a life of usefulness and honour. I have thought so often of the parable of the talents; only I fear this case is worse. His poor mother! I wonder if I could write to her! Yet ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... panting heart of fire; And in the storm-dismantled forest-choir For thine own elegy thy winds attune Their wild and wizard lyre: And poignant grows the charm of thy decay, The pathos of thy beauty, and the sting, Thou parable of greatness vanishing! For me, thy woods of gold and skies of ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... victim, and arraying in royal attire, the scourging and the mockery, the binding or nailing to a tree, the tears of Mary, and the resurrection and the empty coffin!—or how not at all strange when we consider in what numerous forms and among how many peoples, this same parable and ritual had as a matter of fact been celebrated, and how it had ultimately come down to bring its message of redemption into a somewhat obscure Syrian city, in the special shape ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... face looking in at his door would have been as that of an angel! And he knew that all the time his debts were increasing, and when would he begin to pay them off! His mind wandered; and when Sullivan came at length, he was talking wildly, imagining himself the prodigal son in the parable. ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... Isaac, too, conjoined tillage with pastoral husbandry, and that with success, for "he sowed in the land Gerar, and reaped an hundred-fold''—a return which, it would appear, in some favoured regions, occasionally rewarded the labour of the husbandman. In the parable of the sower, Jesus Christ mentions an increase of thirty, sixty ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Kathleen, I assure you I am not angry. I am merely a little sorry for human nature. I could have sworn Woods was honest. But rogues all, rogues all, Kathleen! Money rules us in the end; and now the parable is fulfilled, and Love the prodigal returns to make merry over the calf of gold. Confess," Mr. Kennaston queried, with a smile, "is it not strange an all-wise Creator should have been at pains to fashion this brave world about us for little ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... poetry. Death's Jest-Book is perhaps the most morbid poem in our literature. There is not a page without its sad, grotesque, gay, or abhorrent imagery of the tomb. A slave cannot say that a lady is asleep without turning it into a parable of death: ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. He said that he who should not leave every thing, houses and children and lands, and follow him, could not be his disciple. He told the parable of the rich man who did nothing bad, like our own rich men, but who only arrayed himself in costly garments, and ate and drank daintily, and who lost his soul thereby; and of poor Lazarus, who ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... no. But you sneered at my parable of the successful gambler, whereas I believe in it implicitly. I have seen that type of fool backing the red, staking his six thousand francs on every coup, and have watched a run of twelve, thirteen, seventeen, twenty-one; but ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... working in the throes of commercial speculation, and he stared, heedless of the jibe. So Johnny Coe took up his sapient parable. ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... The parable of "the prodigal son" is rightly called "the pearl of parables," and our Master's greatest utterance may well be called "the diamond sermon." No purer and more exalted teachings ever fell upon human ears than those contained ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... of the subjects represented in the windows of the cathedral, it appears that the north windows of the north-east transept depicted the Parable of the Sower. The ancient glass, however, has been displaced, and a good deal of it has been moved to the windows of the north choir aisle, between the transept and the Chapel of the Martyrdom, which are of great beauty, and should be examined carefully. In the transept itself are ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... in our modern world. Lacking the solid reserves of its rival, involved in all the exactions that fall on a tributary nation, the cotton manufacture of Ireland lost ground, lost heart, and disappeared. But let us resume the parable. If the "business man" responds to capital, he will certainly not be obtuse to the appeal of coal. In this feeder of industry Ireland was geologically at a disadvantage, and it was promised that the ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... up his parable and said, "If thou wilt learn who is my Master, it is Jesus Christ the Lord, the only-begotten Son of God, 'the blessed and only potentate, the King of kings, and Lords of lords; who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... Night," "The Spirit on the Face of the Waters," "Creation of Birds and Fishes," "Eden," and "The Parable of the Good Seed," by Pupils of H. A. Payne, Birmingham School of Art. These lose very much by reduction, and should be seen with a lens magnifying 2-1/2 diameters. They are the designs of the pupils themselves (boys in their teens), and are examples of bold outline untouched after ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... reality more sober and truthful, in the midst of its apparent extravagance, than the gravest cogitations of ordinary men. It is surely no incredible thing, that He who, in the dispensations of the human period, spake by type and symbol, and who, when He walked the earth in the flesh, taught in parable and allegory, should have also spoken in the geologic ages by prophetic figures embodied in the form and structure of animals. Nay, what the poet imagined, though in a somewhat extreme form, the philosophers seem to be on the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... the Colonnas absolved; he released the barons and prelates of France from the excommunications pronounced against them; and he himself wrote to the king to say that he would behave towards him as the good shepherd in the parable, who leaves ninety and nine sheep to go after one that is lost. Nogaret and the direct authors of the assault at Anagni were alone excepted from this amnesty. The pope reserved for a future occasion the announcement of their absolution, when he should consider it expedient. But on the 7th ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Thursday William Blake A Story for a Child Bayard Taylor The Spider and the Fly Mary Howitt The Captain's Daughter James Thomas Fields The Nightingale and the Glow-Worm William Cowper Sir Lark and King Sun: A Parable George Macdonald The Courtship, Merry Marriage, and Picnic Dinner of Cock Robin and Jenny Wren Unknown The Babes in the Wood Unknown God's Judgment on a Wicked Bishop Robert Southey The Pied Piper of Hamelin ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... up Christ as an ideal of perfect manhood, and then you proceed to demolish him as a possible example, by maintaining that he was not a man, but a God, and therefore a being whom it is beyond the power of man to imitate! Oh, you terrible, terrible clergy! You preach the parable of the buried talents, and side by side with that you have always insisted that women should put theirs away; and you have soothed their sensitive consciences with the dreadful cant of obedience—not obedience ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... Dale, there's lots of us that are ready to take up our share of the duties the Creator designed for us. We are standing waiting like the people in the parable that nobody had hired. The trouble is you won't let us, you men won't. We've got to wait for you to give us our rights. All our willingness doesn't amount to anything ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... senses are useless as a medium if the internal activity does not open the doors to receive it. When the most striking miracles of Christ are related in the gospel, the narrative always concludes with: "And many of those who saw, believed." The parable of the invitation to the feast, to which those who were absorbed in their own affairs could not respond, seems to indicate a fact similar to this intellectual fact, that the "preoccupations" of complicated pre-existing ideas prevent the new and obvious truth that presents itself, from ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... fixing his attention. All the rest of the day he lay on the sofa, silent and dozing, till in the evening, when left alone with Johnnie, he only roused himself to ask to have a Bible placed within his reach, and there losing his way in searching for the parable of the strayed sheep, he wandered about in the sayings of St. ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... parable, and, whenever you fall in with an unlighted mind in your walk of life, drop a kind and glowing thought upon it from yours, and set it a-burning in the world with a light that shall shine in some dark place to beam on ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... much of a coward to confess my fault to my father; I had already begun to think of him as "an austere man," like him in the parable of the talents. I should have been a much happier child if I bad confessed, for I had to carry about with me for weeks and months a heavy burden of shame. I thought of myself as a thief, and used to dream of being carried off to jail and condemned to the gallows for my offense: ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... came from a spot in the Western Sea, many leagues distant, to sell that book at half the price it cost; and that their souls' welfare depended on their being acquainted with it. I then explained to them the nature of the New Testament, and read to them the parable of the Sower. They stared at each other again, but said that they were poor, and could not buy books. I rose, mounted, and was going away, saying to them: "Peace bide with you." Whereupon the young man with the gun rose, and saying, "Caspita! ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... his hearers.—When Christ taught the people he used material that they could comprehend. Thus, when he spoke his parable of the sower, while he sat by the seaside, the multitude before him had gathered from the villages and farms of the country round about. They therefore could thoroughly appreciate the lesson. His parable of the vineyard was doubtless suggested by the vine-clad ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... father nor mother, to spouse, son, or daughter; neither to be spoken aloud nor whispered; to be told in words or written in characters; to be carved or to be painted, or to be otherwise communicated, either directly, or by parable and emblem. Obey this behest, and thy life is in surety. Let thy heart then rejoice within thee, but let it rejoice with trembling. Never more let thy vanity persuade thee that thou art secure from the servants ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 373, Supplementary Number • Various
... The parable of the talents illustrates and enforces one of nature's sternest laws: "To him that hath shall be given; from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." Scientists call this law the survival of the fittest. The fittest are those who use what they have, who gain strength by struggle, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... an appeal to reason in politics, the difficulty in this parable recurs. For there is an inherent difficulty about using the method of reason to deal with an unreasoning world. Even if you assume with Plato that the true pilot knows what is best for the ship, you have to recall that he is not so ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... profound. The best-known of these lay sermons is: "The Queen of the Air" (1869), a splendid blending of his fancy with the Greek nature-myths of cloud and storm, represented by Athena, goddess of the heavens, of the earth, and of the heart. The parable drawn is that "the air is given us for our life, the rain for our thirst and baptism, the fire for our warmth, the sun for our light, and the earth for our meat and rest." Related to the work is "Ethics of the Dust" (1865), lectures ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... her malady came swiftly upon her, and suddenly she found herself helpless, penniless, abandoned, her mind already clouded, and clouding faster! . . . Eileen, was there then the shadow of a doubt as to the responsibility? Because a man's son was named in the parable, does the lesson end there—and are there no others as prodigal—no other bonds that hold as inexorably ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... on the equities involved in the projected course of empire to which these two enterprising nations are committing themselves must run within the lines of diplomatic parable, and will have none but a speculative interest. It is not a matter of equity. Accepting the situation as it stands, it is evident that any peace can only have a qualified meaning, in the sense of armistice, so long as there is opportunity for national enterprise of the character on ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... looked up, she saw the tears rolling down the child's face. At the same time, from the expression of his countenance, she judged that his understanding had grasped nothing. She turned therefore to the parable of the prodigal son, and read it. Even that had not a few words and phrases unknown to Gibbie, but he did not fail to catch the drift of the perfect story. For had not Gibbie himself had a father, to whose bosom he went home every night? Let but love ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... face in her lap; and sobbed myself to sleep with premature grief. But when I awakened, and felt her cool hand upon my hot forehead, and heard the low, sweet song, or the gentle story, or the tenderly told parable from the Bible, with which she tried to soothe me, I could not resist the mystic fascination that lured me, as I lay in her lap, to steal a glance at her through ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... Divine direction was vouchsafed to her and she discovered her design to her sire, the Wazir, who thereupon forbade her, fearing her slaughter. However, she repeated her words to him a second time and a third, but he consented not. Then he cited to her a parable, which should deter her, and she cited to him a parable of import contrary to his, and the debate was prolonged between them and the adducing of instances, till her father saw that he was powerless ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... utter dissipation of selfhood. That is the inescapable horror of sin. That is what we mean when we say sinners are lost; so they are, they are lost to their own selves. With what discriminating truth the father in the parable of the lost boy speaks. "This, my son," he says, "was dead though he is alive again." So it is with us; being is the price we pay for sinning. The more we do wrong the less we are. How then shall we become ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... nobler parable more nobly expressed? It may well end the last page of the last chapter of The Adventure ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... its heavy yoke Upon the old white-bearded folk Who strive to please the King. God's mercy is upon the young, God's wisdom in the baby tongue That fears not anything. The Parable of Chajju Bhagat. ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... was manifest in the victory; his final humiliation, which he owed to his own weakness and disobedience, and the present revelry and feasting of the uncircumsised Philistines in the temple of their idol,—all these things together constitute a parable of which no reader of Milton's day could possibly mistake the interpretation. More obscurely adumbrated is the day of vengeance, when virtue should return to the repentant backslider, and the idolatrous crew should be smitten with a swift ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... immediately on my return I should make her a report upon Butaritari; and that if my house should have been again invaded by natives, a man-of-war would be despatched to make reprisals. It was scarce the fact—rather a just and necessary parable of the fact, corrected for latitude; and it certainly told upon the king. He was much affected; he had conceived the notion (he said) that I was a man of some importance, but not dreamed it was as bad as this; and the missionary house was tapu'd ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have not been taught even how to read and write. The storm of political controversy on educational matters has centred round such questions as whether the story of Joseph and his Brethren and the Parable of the Prodigal Son should be taught to little Baptists by a Church of England teacher, and what proportion of rates paid by Church of England ratepayers should go to giving little Baptists a Baptistical training. If there was a Christ who could come down among us, with what scorching sarcasm ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... that it is necessary to say here. You might think that I am only repeating a kind of parable. The important thing is the opinion of scientific men that humanity will at last, in the course of millions of years, reach the ethical conditions of the ants. It is only five or six years ago that some of these conditions were established by scientific evidence, and I want ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... judge justly of those questions. I ask you to learn how to "conquer nature by obeying her," as the great Lord Bacon said two hundred and fifty years ago. For so only will you in your theories and your movements, draw "bills which nature will honour"—to use Mr. Carlyle's famous parable—because they are according to her unchanging laws, and not have them returned on your hands, as too many theorists' are, with "no effects" written ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... a defence of the cosmopolitan attitude which could rejoice at an improvement in the prospects of our hereditary rival. Christ taught not patriotism, but universal benevolence, as the parable of the Good Samaritan shows. "My neighbour" is he to whom I can do most good, whether foreigner or fellow-citizen. We should love our country "ardently but not exclusively," considering ourselves "citizens of the world," and taking care "to maintain a just ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... their places of worship, at my request, a New York lady, well skilled in rapid writing and familiar with the negro vernacular, reported verbatim the negro preacher's sermon. The text was the parable of the ten virgins; and as the preacher went on, he said: "Five ob dem war wise an' five of dem war foolish. De wise jes gone an' dun git dar lamps full up ob oil and git rite in and see de bridegoom; an' de foolish dey sot dem rite down on de stool ob do-noting, an' dar dey sot till de ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... at least, He thought so, and existence charmed. The credulous indeed are blest, And he who, jealousy disarmed, In sensual sweets his soul doth steep As drunken tramps at nightfall sleep, Or, parable more flattering, As butterflies to blossoms cling. But wretched who anticipates, Whose brain no fond illusions daze, Who every gesture, every phrase In true interpretation hates: Whose heart experience icy made And yet ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... Michael had mourned for years over a marble tomb on the lawn! But it really is a great worry. They must all begin digging, and keep on until they find something definite. It will be good for the shrubbery and the plantation, like the silly old man in the parable—no, I mean fable—who pretended he had hidden a treasure. Oh, Jim, don't look so distressed. I ought not to pour out all these trivial things to you; but since I have known Michael is coming back, my mind seems to have become foolish and trivial ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... Henry," says my old lord, with a little frown, a thing rare with him. "You have been the elder brother of the parable in the good sense; you must be careful ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Cato falls into the trap. He takes up his parable, and preaches his sermon, but he does it with a marvellous enthusiasm, so that we cannot understand that the man who wrote it intended to demolish it all in the next few pages. I will translate his last words of Cato's appeal ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... am whiter than thou," is simply a new and indefensible form of Pharisaism. The church exists to proclaim certain truths, among which the brotherhood of man stands pre-eminent. It is difficult to see with what consistency a Christian minister can preach on the parable of the Good Samaritan if his church refuses to recognize a Christian brother in one of another race because he belongs to another race. There is no reason for an attempt to corral all men of all races in one inclosure; but for any church, especially for a church ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 7, July, 1889 • Various
... New Testament a figurative discourse, or a story with a typical meaning. In the Old Testament it sometimes signifies a mere discourse, as Job's parable, Job xxvi-xxxi. inclusive. The Parable, in the New Testament sense, was and is a common mode of expression in ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... similar significance, a bringing near to the eye of what exists in reality only for the mind and heart. A symbol, however, is an arbitrary fiction, and stands to the idea as a metaphor does to the thing itself. In literature the parable of the mustard seed to which the kingdom of heaven was likened, exemplifies symbolical or metaphorical method; but the tale of the court of Arthur's knights, ideal method; between them, and sharing something of both, lies allegorical method. Idolatry is the religion of symbolism, ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... except where Arthur is?" she answered quietly, and I then remembered a worthless brother of that name to whom she was passionately attached. "Even Dives in the parable," she went on, "was unable to forget the five brethren he had left behind him, and cried out amid the flames, asking that Lazarus be sent to warn them, lest they, too, came to that place of torment. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the weather was hot no breath of air reached the poor prisoners, but through the cracks in the boards. No wonder that the missionary soon fell ill of a fever. His wife, fearing he would die, determined to act like the widow in the parable, and to weary the unjust judge by her entreaties. She left her quiet cottage, and built a hut of bamboos at the governor's gate, and there she lived with her babe, and the little Burmese girls. The prison was just opposite the governor's ...
— Far Off • Favell Lee Mortimer
... rare women who, like the Virgins of the Parable, have kept their lamps lighted, will always appear very small in the eyes of the defenders of virtue and fine feeling; but we must needs exclude it from the total sum of honest women, and this subtraction, ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... order to bring about conversions, George Sand has more faith in gentle, agreeable people, and, in conclusion, she tells us: "We believe that the mission of art is a mission of sentiment and of love, and that the novel of to-day ought to take the place of the parable and the apologue of more primitive times." The object of the artist, she tells us, "is to make people appreciate what he presents to them." With that end in view, he has a right to embellish his subjects a little. "Art," we are told, "is not a study of positive reality; it is the ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... good time for the money is still here. I have little to say to you, for your own feelings convince me that it is needless. Do you think that you can read a little? Then read this." Anderson turned to the parable of the Prodigal Son, which I read to him. "And now," said he, turning ever the leaves, "here is one ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... is what the poet wrote down. He wrote it in the form of a parable, which he called "The ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... look back on our lives, With penitent sighs and tears, Our evil that with Thee strives and strives In Thy parable's truth appears. ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... before one can believe in his teachings? The truth is always divine. What difference does it make whether the one who utters it be human or divine, bond or slave, AEsop or Marcus Aurelius? the truth remains the same. A fable is only another name of a parable. We have the story of the lost sheep; that's a parable; and that of the lamb that muddied the stream, and that's a fable. One is sacred, the other profane, but both are fables, both parables. When you take them away from the context ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... and beautiful," said Mr. Gray. "Christ forgave a sinner—a woman of the city—and He had somewhat to say to His host, the Pharisee, about it. He spoke a very telling parable at that dinner." ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... assent. "Amen," she said, "so be it.—And so, no doubt, it will be. Did the Lord cast out the woman taken in adultery? Did he not give us the parable of the Samaritan?—Poor little girl! We have often wished for a daughter and now we have found one; a pretty creature she is too. God grants us all our wishes! But you must be tired, old man; go to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... address. Just at the commencement it had caused an uneasy feeling, when Martens began to speak about the great riches of the deceased. There was some apprehension lest he should make some ill-timed application of the parable of the camel and the needle's eye; but the speaker had just managed to say the right thing. There is nothing which gives the poor so much pleasure, as to hear how little power really belongs to earthly wealth, and how little there is to grudge when it comes to the last. And so this allusion ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... well once a year, if not oftener, to remind men by parable of the old, simple truths; to teach them that forgiveness, and charity, and the endeavor for life better and purer than each has lived, are the principles upon which alone the world holds together and gets forward. It was well for the comfortable and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... assured that it is true, and that my hands have handled and my eyes seen the things of which I tell you. At the age of seventy-one, Dr. Scott wrote upon an enamelled card with a stile, on space exactly equal to that of one side of a three-cent piece,—The Lord's Prayer, the Apostles' Creed, the Parable of the Ten Virgins, the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, the Beatitudes, the fifteenth Psalm, the one hundred and twentieth Psalm, the one hundred and thirty-third Psalm, the one hundred and thirty-first Psalm, and the ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... otherwise, by which steamships are built, because other nations are so doing and are prosecuting for their manifest advantage this vastly more important business upon the ocean, which we are forbidden to engage in, because we cannot build ships. The homely illustration at the close of the parable on the concluding page, is certainly applicable. We are not allowed to whittle, ...
— Free Ships: The Restoration of the American Carrying Trade • John Codman
... from church with Mrs. Montagu and Emily and Mrs. Procter, discussing among various things the necessity for "preparation" before taking the sacrament. I suppose the publican in the parable had not prepared his prayer, and I suppose he would have been a ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... which provided Beethoven with his "Fidelio," brought out a comic opera on the subject of the Prodigal Son in 1811, and Berton, who had also dipped into Old Testament story in an oratorio, entitled "Absalon," illustrated the parable in a ballet. The most recent settings of the theme are also the most significant: Auber's five-act opera "L'Enfant Prodigue," brought out in Paris in 1850, and Ponchielli's "Il Figliuolo Prodigo," in four acts, which had its first representation ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the Great. But the real reference is to its spiritual glory. It was honored by the presence of the Son of God, who is the brightness of the Father's glory. In the third message, "in the four and twentieth day of the ninth month," the prophet in a sort of parable, rebukes the people for their heartless formality, which, like the touch of a dead body, defiles all their offerings and services, yet promises them God's blessing upon their repentance. Chap. 2:10-19. The last message, which was delivered on the same day, is wholly occupied with ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... the sky above, nor in the air around, nor in the earth beneath; it is in our own spirits, it lives within us; and if we would find it, like the lost silver of the woman of the parable, we must look at home, to the inward temple, which the inward eye discovereth, and wherein the spirit of all truth is manifested. The voice of that spirit is still and small, and the light about it shineth in darkness. But truth is there; and if we seek it in low humility, in a patient ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... have sacrificed all the veal in the country in honour of Jack's repentance; and the Curate stood outside upon the threshold, looking at the scene with the strangest half-angry, half-comical realisation of the state of mind of the elder brother in the parable. He had himself been rather found fault with, excused, and tolerated, among his relations; but Jack had at once become master of the position, and taken possession of all their sympathies. Mr Wentworth stood gazing ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... phrase &c. 566; figure, trope, metaphor, enallage[obs3], catachresis[obs3]; metonymy[Gram], synecdoche[Semant]; autonomasia|!, irony, figurativeness &c. adj.; image, imagery; metalepsis[obs3], type, anagoge[obs3], simile, personification, prosopopoeia[obs3], allegory, apologue[obs3], parable, fable; allusion, adumbration; application. exaggeration , hyperbole &c. 549. association, association of ideas (analogy) 514a V. employ -metaphor &c. n.; personify, allegorize, adumbrate, shadow forth, apply, allude to. Adj. metaphorical, figurative, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... words, or colour, or sound is always haunted by the inexpressible—by spiritual impotence to overcome the laws of imprisonment in the flesh. He clutches at symbol and suggestion, at parable and fable, conscious of the truth that the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... Jerusalem, and generally throughout Palestine; the seeds of which, have an aromatic pungency, which enables them to be used instead of the ordinary mustard (Sinapis nigra); besides which, its structure presents all the essentials to sustain the illustration sought to be established in the parable, some of which are wanting or dubious in the common plant, It has a very small seed; it may be sown in a garden: it grows into an "herb," and eventually "becometh a tree; so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof." With every allowance for the ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... imagination, tells what's not true, just to deceive people an' mislead 'em, we call it lyin', but when his imagination invents what's not true merely for the fun o' the thing, an' tells it as a joke, never pretendin' that it's true, he ain't lyin', he's only tellin' a story, or a anecdote, or a parable. Now, Dan, put that in your pipe an' smoke it. Likewise shut your potato-trap, and let me go on wi' my story, which is, (he looked impressively round, while every eye gazed, and ear listened, and mouth opened in breathless attention), the Adventure of Robinson Crusoe ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... have described, went softly on, into a vaulted chamber, now used as a store-room: once the chapel of the Holy Office. The place where the tribunal sat, was plain. The platform might have been removed but yesterday. Conceive the parable of the Good Samaritan having been painted on the wall of one of these Inquisition chambers! But it was, and ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... principles, and call into exercise moral feelings inconsistent with slavery. It is this: "Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me." The design of the Saviour, in the parable from which these words are taken, in Matt. xxv, is, to impress strongly upon the human mind, that character, deficient in correct moral feeling, will prove fatal to human hopes in ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... and obvious sense, of every statement contained within the covers of the Bible. For her, and for my Father, nothing was symbolic, nothing allegorical or allusive in any part of Scripture, except what was, in so many words, proffered as a parable or a picture. Pushing this to its extreme limit, and allowing nothing for the changes of scene or time or race, my parents read injunctions to the Corinthian converts without any suspicion that what was apposite in dealing with half-breed Achaian colonists ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... world-wide development of the Church and the permeating influence of the Gospel, in the light of the interpretation of the previous parables they can mean only the mixture of evil with that which began as small as a mustard seed and as pure as meal. The fifth parable is of a treasure hid in a field, which pictures the earthly people in the world; while their real relation to Christ is covered until the accomplishment of that which is revealed in the sixth. Here the same man, the Lord Jesus Christ, sells all that He hath to purchase the Church, ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer
... as the 'parable poet,' but as a fact he was a physician of extraordinary talent who had practised first at Bury St. Edmunds and afterwards at Spring Gardens, London, until he partly retired to be private physician to the late Lady Ripon. After her death he left practice altogether in order to devote himself to ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton |
