"Aesop" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... about as unjust to the ocean, as some of AEsop's are to the animals. The ocean is a magnanimous element, and would scorn to assassinate a poor fellow, let alone taunting him in the act. But I don't understand what you say about enmity couched in friendship, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... quidem; here's that you say will take them? A thousand thanks, sweet sir; I say to you, As Tully in his Aesop's Fables said Ago tibi ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... the sake of reading all the papers that came to town. He read everything he could lay his hands on; the Bible, Shakespeare, Pilgrim's Progress, Life of Washington and Life of Franklin, Life of Henry Clay, AEsop's Fables; he read them over and over again until he could almost repeat them by heart; but he never read a novel in his life. His education came from the newspapers and from his contact with men and things. After he read a book he would write out an analysis of it. What a grand sight ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... original, but he was a copious translator. He rendered into the Anglo-Saxon tongue—which he sought to enrich with the fatness of other soils—the historical works of Orosius and of Bede; nay, it is said the Fables of Aesop, and the Psalms of David—desirous, it would seem, to teach his people morality and religion, through the fine medium, of ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... was none. All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and all others successively picked out, and thrown away. Something like the same process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these books. The world takes liberties with world-books. Vedas,[586] AEsop's Fables,[587] Pilpay,[588] Arabian Nights,[589] Cid,[590] Iliad,[591] Robin Hood,[592] Scottish Minstrelsy,[593] are not the work of single men. In the composition of such works, the time thinks, the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... in Love,' of AEsop's fable. He will let her draw his teeth yet," said Mr. Clarence, in a low tone, quite drowned in the joyous swell of ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... by a pair of stars would not kindle to greater warmth than did those elderly orbs into which Harry poured his gaze. Nevertheless, he plunged into their blue depths, and fancied he saw heaven in their calm brightness. So that silly dog (of whom Aesop or the Spelling-book used to tell us in youth) beheld a beef-bone in the pond, and snapped at it, and lost the beef-bone he was carrying. O absurd cur! He saw the beefbone in his own mouth reflected in the treacherous pool, which dimpled, I dare say, with ever so many smiles, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... errors of an habit so excellent. Seek the good of other men, but be not in bondage to their faces or fancies; for that is but facility or softness; which taketh an honest mind prisoner. Neither give thou AEsop's cock a gem, who would be better pleased and happier if he had had a barley-corn. The example of God teacheth the lesson truly: He sendeth his rain and maketh his sun to shine upon the just and unjust; but ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... at it, but would sometimes help one another when they began to be weary, which did happen now and then, though not often; besides, as most of their luggage was our provision, it lightened every day, like Aesop's basket of bread, till we came to get a recruit.—Note, when we loaded them we untied their hands, and tied them two and two together by ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... been pictured as a mad dog (p. 7) in The Metamorphosis (1728), attributed by Pope to Smedley and one of the least pleasant of the pamphlets. Pope as Aesop's toad bursting with spleen (p. 12) had been used in Codrus (1728), p. 12, attributed by Pope to Curll and Mrs. Thomas. Cibber's prevention of Pope from peopling the isle with Calibans (p. 9) is a reference, of course, ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... small things has been pointed out by philosophers over and over again from AEsop downward. "Great without small makes a bad wall," says a quaint Greek proverb, which seems to go back to cyclopean times. In an old Hindoo story Ammi says to his son, "Bring me a fruit of that tree and break it open. What is there?" ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... all; and Diccon Haggard, my mother's cousin, lives in Coventry. So out upon your musty Latin—English is good enough for me this day! There's bluebells blowing in the dingles, and cuckoo-buds no end. And while ye are all grinding at your old Aesop I shall be roaming over ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... one of the most learned heads of ancient Greece, I inherit my talent for literature. Another relation of mine, an uncle on my mother's side, was the principal in the great walking match which is so graphically described by AEsop. But enough of my family. I promised to tell you something about my life. I am so sleepy that I don't know as I can make it ...
— Harper's Young People, May 4, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... conception of the fables was based upon the combination of two ideas—that of the stiff dry moral apologue of AEsop, and that of the short story. By far the most important of these two elements was the latter. With the old fabulists the moral was the excuse for the fable; with La Fontaine it was the other way round. His moral, added in a conventional tag, or even, sometimes, omitted altogether, was simply ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... AEsop and others" (Newcastle: T. Saint, 1784) deserves fuller notice, but AEsop, though a not unpopular book for children, is hardly a children's book. With "The Looking Glass for the Mind" (1792) we have ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... activity of the spirit, which is essentially ourselves, is so easily ignored or denied. Some confound the spiritual activity of man with the metaphorical and mythological activity of so-called nature, which is mechanism and has no resemblance to human activity, save when we imagine, with Aesop, that arbores loquuntur non tantum ferae. Some even affirm that they have never observed in themselves this "miraculous" activity, as though there were no difference, or only one of quantity, between sweating and thinking, feeling ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... Aztecs, to Spain, and to the border of ballads and Sir Walter Scott's romances. I found that I could not comprehend the coyote as animal hero of Pueblo and Plains Indians apart from the Reynard of Aesop ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... round fish, called from its shape the Globe-fish, and from its skin the "Sea-hedgehog"; it is covered with sharp thorns, and has the power, by swallowing air, of so greatly increasing its size (without sharing the fate of the poor toad in AEsop's Fable) that it not only can rise to the surface of the water, but float as long as it pleases. Then there are the blue Flying-herrings, with long fins, which you would see if you took a voyage to ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... Aesop knew human nature very well when he wrote his fable of the old man and his ass, who tried to please everybody and ended up by pleasing nobody. Bearing this in mind, Madame Midas determined to please herself, and take no one's advice but her own ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... in the illustration) consist of incidents connected with the battle, and add greatly to its interest. Some of the earlier scenes are very amusing, having evidently been suggested by the fables of AEsop and Phaedrus; there are griffins, dragons, serpents, dogs, elephants, lions, birds, and monsters that suggest a knowledge of pre-Adamite life (some biting their own tails, or putting their heads into their neighbours' ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... of the most original figures in the world,— short, broad, but not fat, ill-shaped without being deformed; in short, an Aesop in gown and wig. His more than seventy-years-old face was completely twisted into a sarcastic smile; while his eyes always remained large, and, though red, were always brilliant and intelligent. He lived ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... learned only can understand him; that is to say, he teacheth them that are already taught. But the poet is the food for the tenderest stomachs; the poet is, indeed, the right popular philosopher. Whereof AEsop's tales give good proof; whose pretty allegories, stealing under the formal tales of beasts, make many, more beastly than beasts, begin to hear the sound of virtue ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... and History of Aesop is involved, like that of Homer, the most famous of Greek poets, in much obscurity. Sardis, the capital of Lydia; Samos, a Greek island; Mesembria, an ancient colony in Thrace; and Cotiaeum, the chief city of a province of Phrygia, contend for the distinction of being the birthplace of Aesop. Although ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... sounds, differently modified by the organs of speech, and variously combined."—Treatise on the Etymology and Syntax of the English Language, p. 1. See the same doctrine also in Hiley's Gram., p. 141. The language which "is common to all animals," can be no other than that in which AEsop's wolves and weasels, goats and grasshoppers, talked—a language quite too unreal for grammar. On the other hand, that which is composed of sounds only, and not of letters, includes but a mere ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... "The rarest thing is to find honest people who want to be simply my equals; but if we must choose, tyranny for tyranny, I prefer that which held the bodies of Aesop and Epictetus in slavery but left their minds free, to that which promises only material liberty and enslaves ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... fable of AEsop, of the boy and the wolf, had then a literal application. Every child in the days of our fathers knew the story of Putnam, and the she-wolf which he dragged from its den. This and similar tales go far to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... at hazard) it is possible to ascribe Aesop, about whom nothing is known except that he wrote the fables which have been imitated from generation to generation. The collection that we possess under his name is one of these imitations, perpetrated long after his death, ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... These tales tell of beliefs of folk less experienced than we: we have outgrown them. They must be suited to the less experienced: give them to children. Thus runs the common argument. And so we find Hawthorne's "Tanglewood Tales," AEsop's "Fables," various Indian myths and Celtic legends, and even the "Niebelungen Lied" often given to quite young children. But do we find this reasoning valid when we examine these tales free from the glamour which adult sophistication casts around ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... great King. His abilities were high even for one of the acute Normans, and he studied at every leisure moment. He translated Aesop's fables, not from Latin into French—which would not have been wonderful—but from Greek to English. He seems to have had a real attachment to the English, feeling that, in their sturdy independence, he had the best preservative from the "outre cuidance" of the Normans. Indeed, ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the WIDOW-BIRD came, though she still wore her weeds. Sir John HERON, of the Lakes, strutted in a grand pas, But no card had been sent to the pilfering DAW, As the Peacock kept up his progenitor's quarrel, Which AEsop relates, about cast-off apparel; For Birds are like Men in their contests together, And, in questions of right, can dispute for ...
— The Peacock 'At Home:' - A Sequel to the Butterfly's Ball • Catherine Ann Dorset
... dense forests to the interior of Spencer county. There, in the land of free labor, he grew up in a log-cabin, with the solemn solitude for his teacher in his meditative hours. Of Asiatic literature he knew only the Bible; of Greek, Latin, and mediaeval, no more than the translation of Aesop's Fables; of English, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. The traditions of George Fox and William Penn passed to him dimly along the lines of two centuries through his ancestors, who ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft
... are ignorant and heedless, and have never read your Aesop. 'Tis he who tells us that the lark was born before all other creatures, indeed before the Earth; his father died of sickness, but the Earth did not exist then; he remained unburied for five days, when the bird in its dilemma decided, for want of a better place, to entomb its father ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... Revised (1674) by Elkanah Settle: and The Empress of Morocco. A Farce (1674) by Thomas Duffet, with an Introduction by Maximillian E. Novak. Already published in this series are reprints of John Ogilby's The Fables of Aesop Paraphras'd in Verse (1668) with an Introduction by Earl Miner and John Gay's Fables (1727, 1738), with an Introduction by Vinton A. Dearing. Publication is assisted by funds from the Chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles. Price to members of the Society, $2.50 for the ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... really thrown over the cliff for being ugly and offensive, or rather for being highly moral and correct. But there is no kind of doubt that the general legend of him may justly rank him with a race too easily forgotten in our modern comparisons: the race of the great philosophic slaves. AEsop may have been a fiction like Uncle Remus: he was also, like Uncle Remus, a fact. It is a fact that slaves in the old world could be worshipped like AEsop, or loved like Uncle Remus. It is odd to note that both the great slaves told their best ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... that universal man wrote by his pen a confession true for one and true for all. His own secret biography he finds in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born. One after another he comes up in his private adventures with every fable of Aesop, of Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and verifies them with ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... having resuscitated our knowledge of the existence of the seed-storing habit. Mr. Moggridge points out that the ancients were familiar with the facts, and quotes the well-known fable of the ant and the grasshopper, which La Fontaine borrowed from Aesop. Mr. Moggridge (page 5) goes on: "So long as Europe was taught Natural History by southern writers the belief prevailed; but no sooner did the tide begin to turn, and the current of information to flood from north to south, than ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Roman history through again, and began it a third time, and read over and over again the stories and prophecies that pleased her in the Bible, and pondered the wood-cuts and texts in a very old edition of AEsop's Fables; and as she wandered in the woods, picking fragrant bayberries and gathering hemlock, checkerberry, and sassafras to put in the beer which her grandmother brewed, she mused on the things that she read till her little mind became a tabernacle of solemn, quaint, dreamy forms, where ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Royal Library at Windsor, which includes the unique perfect AEsop, and one of the two books on vellum (the Doctrinal of Sapience) printed by Caxton; the Archiepiscopal one at Lambeth, rich in rare early printed books and MSS., and the Chetham and Rylands foundations at Manchester, the latter comprehending the Althorp ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... always pervaded the East unfavourable to the dignity of women." They belong to a certain stage of civilisation when the sexes are at war with each other; and they characterise chivalrous Europe as well as misogynous Asia; witness Jankins, clerk of Oxenforde; while AEsop's fable of the Lion and the Man ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... we see? Nothing at first; but wait a minute or two: a little round black knob appears in the middle; gradually it rises higher and higher, till at last you can make out a frog's head, with his great eyes staring hard at you, like the eyes of the frog in the woodcut facing AEsop's fable of the frog and the bull. Not a bit of his body do you see: he is much too cunning for that; he does not know who or what you are; you may be a heron, his mortal enemy, for aught he knows. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... poems and pictures would be plentiful enough. However, there is the apparently authenticated anecdote of young Goldsmith's turning the tables on the fiddler at his uncle's dancing-party. The fiddler, struck by the odd look of the boy who was capering about the room, called out "AEsop!" whereupon Goldsmith is said to ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... this: and as to gold and silver, there is more of them in Lacedaemon than in all the rest of Hellas, for during many generations gold has been always flowing in to them from the whole Hellenic world, and often from the barbarian also, and never going out, as in the fable of Aesop the fox said to the lion, 'The prints of the feet of those going in are distinct enough;' but who ever saw the trace of money going out of Lacedaemon? And therefore you may safely infer that the inhabitants are the richest of the Hellenes in gold and silver, and that ...
— Alcibiades I • (may be spurious) Plato
... cascade. This may be laughed at as too trifling to record; but it is a small characteristick trait in the Flemish picture which I give of my friend, and in which, therefore I mark the most minute particulars. And let it be remembered, that Aesop at play is one of the ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... has reached us, consists of nearly a hundred pieces. Of these three-fourths are fables proper; being not so much translations from the Greek of Aesop as versions of the traditional stories, written and unwritten, which were the common inheritance of the Aryan peoples. Mixed up with these are a number of stories which are not strictly fables; five of them are about Aesop himself, and there are ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... the same expression could have been used before that period, it is as certain as any thing can be proved from historical language, that this part of Genesis is taken from Chronicles, and that Genesis is not so old as Chronicles, and probably not so old as the book of Homer, or as AEsop's Fables; admitting Homer to have been, as the tables of chronology state, contemporary with David or Solomon, and AEsop to have lived about the end ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... each Book, and grouped after their Fables. The name is spelled "Aesop" in Riley, "Esop" in Smart and in the Contents. Inconsistencies in fable numbering are described at the beginning of the Table ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... amazed to behold it. The Turnings and Windings, edged on both sides with green cropt hedges, are not at all tedious, by reason that at every hand there are figures and water-works representing the mysterious and instructive fables of Aesop, with an explanation of what Fable each Fountain representeth carved on each in black marble. Among all the Groves in the Park at Versailles the Labyrinth is the most to be recommended, as well for the novelty of ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... a fictitious story introducing animals or even inanimate things as rational speakers and actors, for the purpose of teaching or enforcing a moral. The fables of AEsop are almost universally known, and the fables of La Fontaine exhibit a high ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... felt that his epigram was unsuccessful, and began to talk about husbandry and the new bailiff, who had come to him the evening before to complain that a labourer, Foma, 'was deboshed,' and quite unmanageable. 'He's such an Aesop,' he said among other things; 'in all places he has protested himself a worthless fellow; he's not a man to keep his place; he'll walk off in a ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... intricate and inexplicable doubts, and trouble all the others that are present. Our discourse should be like our wine, common to all, and of which every one may equally partake; and they that propose hard problems seem no better fitted for society than Aesop's fox and crane. For the fox vexed the crane with thin broth poured out upon a plain table, and laughed at her when he saw her, by reason of the narrowness of her bill and the thinness of the broth, incapable of partaking ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... grammar, until some years later, I learnt no more than the inflections of the nouns and verbs, but, after a course of vocables, proceeded at once to translation; and I faintly remember going through Aesop's Fables, the first Greek book which I read. The Anabasis, which I remember better, was the second. I learnt no Latin until my eighth year. At that time I had read, under my father's tuition, a number of Greek prose authors, among whom I remember the whole of Herodotus, and of Xenophon's Cyropaedia ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... hated. Therefore unto him hastily she goes And, like light Salmacis, her body throws Upon his bosom where with yielding eyes She offers up herself a sacrifice To slake his anger if he were displeased. O, what god would not therewith be appeased? Like Aesop's cock this jewel he enjoyed And as a brother with his sister toyed Supposing nothing else was to be done, Now he her favour and good will had won. But know you not that creatures wanting sense By nature have a mutual appetence, And, wanting organs to advance ...
— Hero and Leander • Christopher Marlowe
... habits, acquired the very best sort of training for his future life. He had no books at his home, and, of course, there were but few to be had in that wild country from other homes. But among those he read over and over again, while a boy, were the Bible, "AEsop's Fables," "Robinson Crusoe," "Pilgrim's Progress," "A History of the United States," and Weems's "Life of Washington," all books of ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... has pleased and instructed mankind. It told important truths, easily perceived, in an entertaining way; and often said more in a few words than could be said through any other kind of writing. Now, no one person is the author of the Fables we know so well. Aesop did not write the Fables bearing his name. There is even reason to believe that Aesop is himself a Fable. At any rate, the things ascribed to him are the work of many hands, and have undergone many changes. These old ...
— Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks - From the French of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... Thomas Saint, about 1770, had the honour of introducing to the public, the brothers Thomas and John Bewick's first efforts in wood-engravings, early and crude as they undoubtedly were. They are to be found in Hutton "On Mensuration," and also in various children's and juvenile works, such as AEsop's and Gay's Fables. We give some of the earliest known of their work in this very interesting collection ...
— Banbury Chap Books - And Nursery Toy Book Literature • Edwin Pearson
... incidents, I shall merely observe that they are numerous, well chosen, interesting and natural. Let me next speak of the moral to be drawn from the poem. Whether the poet, according to Bossu's rule, and Homer's and AEsop's practice, chose the moral first, I cannot pretend to say, though some, who resolve the whole poem into an allegory, favour that opinion. Certain it is, the moral is excellent: the ill effects of inconstancy; and I am sure the fair sex ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... as they might not, could not have been, had he been strong, and active, and more soundly constituted. As it was, no more loyal creature existed, nor did the Creator ever enshrine deeper affections or quicker perceptions in any childish frame. Weird, and wise, and witty as AEsop was this child, like him deformed; and to draw out his quaint remarks, read him fresh from his Maker's hand—this warped, and tiny, imperfect volume of humanity—was to me an ever-new puzzle and delight. Severity he had been used to ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... it. Crawford fixed the price at three days' work, and the future President pulled corn for three days, thus becoming owner of the coveted volume." In addition to this, he was fortunate enough to get hold of AEsop's Fables, Pilgrim's Progress, and the lives of Benjamin Franklin and Henry Clay. He made these books his own by conning them over and over, copying the more impressive portions until they were firmly fixed in his memory. Commenting ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... Jesus and the Sinner, are on par with the eroticism of the Old Testament. The interpolations, the myth, and fable also compare with the first revelation, and, in his opinion, he prefers Andersen's Fairy Tales, or AEsop's Fables. ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... seen round the border of the baptismal vase of St. Louis, in Millin's Antiquites Nationales. A part of the border in the Tapestry is a representation of subjects from Aesop's Fables. ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... every other calling the first great requisite is self-reliance. The man who depends upon his neighbors, as Aesop illustrates in one of his fables, never has his work done. But when he says that he will do it himself on a certain day, then it is prudent for the bird that has been nesting in his ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... Your sex's much-lov'd enemy; For other foes we are prepar'd, And Nature puts us on our guard: In that alone such charms are found, We court the dart, we nurse the hand; And this, my child, an Aesop's Fable Will prove much better than ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... me this one question—and mind that you don't tell lies—you may not be aware of it, but you can't plead ignorance, for I now tell you that it is exceedingly wicked to tell lies, whether you be a frog or only a boy. Now, tell me, did you ever read 'Aesop's Fables?'" ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... example, is obtained in part from the Cherokee collection, and in part from Schoolcraft, who lived among the Ojibways, or Chippewas as they are often called. That certain tales are similar to fables of AEsop is explained by the theory that a primitive people, observing nature, ...
— Two Indian Children of Long Ago • Frances Taylor
... with peacocks' feathers are the Snobs of this world: and never, since the days of Aesop, were they more numerous in any land than they are at present in ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the great Latin authors had been printed prior to 1500, the most important exception being the Annals of Tacitus, of which the editio princeps was in 1515. Between the years 1478 and 1500, the following Greek works had been published, and in this order: Aesop, Homer, Isocrates, Theocritus, the Anthology, four plays of Euripides, Aristotle, Theognis, and nine plays of Aristophanes. Follow the dates of the editiones principes of ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Morien, with a bewitching smile, which displayed two rows of the most exquisitely white teeth, "dear friend, you should always leave open a way of retreat; even as Aesop in descending the mountain was not happy in the easy and delightful path, but already sighed over the difficulties of the next ascent, so should women never be contented with the joys of the present ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... AEsop, in so far as he was historical, would seem to have been a Phrygian slave, or at least one not to be specially and symbolically adorned with the Phrygian cap of liberty. He lived, if he did live, about the sixth century before Christ, ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... priest, who lived in the early part of the fifth century,—a work suggested by Saint Augustine's "City of God." The "Ecclesiastical History" of Bede was also translated by Alfred. He is said to have translated the Proverbs of Solomon and the Fables of Aesop. His greatest literary work, however, was the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the principal authority of the reign of Alfred. No man of his day wrote the Saxon language so purely as did Alfred himself; and he was distinguished not only for his knowledge of Latin, but for profound ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... Jew hath disposed of L1100 in this manner, which is very strange; and certainly this year of 1666 will be a year of great action; but what the consequences of it will be, God knows! Thence to the 'Change, and from my stationer's thereabouts carried home by coach two books of Ogilby's, his AEsop and Coronation, which fell to my lot at his lottery. Cost me L4 besides the binding. So home. I find my wife gone out to Hales, her paynter's, and I after a little dinner do follow her, and there do find him at worke, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... of such minds in narrative is amusing. Let us suppose that I am asking some kushto Rommany chal for a version of AEsop's fable of the youth and the cat. He is sitting comfortably by the fire, and good ale has put him into a ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... among them a beautiful one dealing with King Arthur and the Round Table. These works are of rare charm, no less for their pleasing style and depth of feeling than for their simplicity of expression and clearness of narrative. Her second effort was a poetical rendering of many of AEsop's fables, done either as a favour or a tribute of love for her protector. This was followed by a translation of the Purgatory of St. Patrick in Ireland, ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... Hebrew Grammar; an Essay by Lord Herbert of Cherbury; some metrical religious remains of Francis Quarles, then just dead; some attempts to introduce the mystic Jacob Bohme, by specimens of his works; a translation of AEsop's Fables and those of Phaedrus; the issue of the second and third parts of the Epistolae Hoelianae or James Howell's Letters, with a re-issue of his "Dodona's Grove;" and a re-issue of Randolph's comedy of "The ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... sleep in our beds, bathe in white-tiled bathtubs, think our thoughts, learn our vices, and then, having led them to despise their own way of living, send them back to their people who have not changed while their children were being literally reborn—what does this accomplish? Doesn't Aesop tell us something of a crow that would be a dove and found himself an outcast everywhere? We are replacing the beautiful symbolism of the Indian by our materialism and leaving him bewildered and discouraged. Why should he be taught to despise his hogan, shaped after the beautiful rounded curve ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... one boy to make a fight. Even your bully does not like to "pitch on" an inoffensive school-mate. You remember AEsop's fable of the wolf and the lamb, and what pains the wolf took to pick a quarrel with the lamb. It was a little hard for Pewee to fight with a boy who walked quietly to and from the school, without ...
— The Hoosier School-boy • Edward Eggleston
... of the fifth class, than they do now out of the second or first, although now much better authors are read there. Formerly there was nothing but the Parables of Alan <of Lille, fl. 1200>, the moral distichs of Cato, Aesop's Fables, and a few others, whom the moderns despise; but the boys worked hard, and made their own way over difficulties. Now when even in small schools the choicest authors are read, ancient and modern, prose and poetry, there is not the same profit; for virtue and industry are declining. ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... two decorative objects and half shadowed by the bright-green fronds of a large artificial palm, sat AEsop Loving, son-in-law of the senior partner. From his parent-by-marriage AEsop had borrowed desk-room for the carrying on of the multitudinous business relating to the general management of one of the celebrations projected in honor, and on account of, the Eighth ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... indeed, might the Muses wonder at the rise of the novel and its vast developments, for the classic literature presents no similar works. One of Plato's dialogues or Aesop's fables is as near an approach to a prose romance as antiquity in its golden eras can offer. The few productions of the kind which appeared during the decline of literature in the early Christian centuries, as the "Golden Ass" of Apuleius and the "AEthiopica" of Heliodorus, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... at Rome, during the banishment of Cicero,(214) when some verses of Accius,(215) which reproached the Greeks with their ingratitude in suffering the banishment of Telamon, were repeated by AEsop, the best actor of his time, they drew tears from the eyes of ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... and tends to comprise the whole. Men spun their fictions from the materials with which their minds were stored, much as we do to-day, and the result was a cycle of beast-fables—an Odyssey of the brute creation. Of these the tales of Aesop are the best examples. The beast-fable has never quite gone out of fashion, and never will so long as men retain their world-wonder, and childishness of mind. A large part of Gulliver's adventures belong to this class of literature. It was only the other day that Mr. Kipling ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... for death, my friend, for all his scorns? With Aesop's slave will leave his bush of thorns. But since these trait'rous lords will have my head, Their lordships here upon this homely bed Shall find me sleeping, breathing forth my breath, Till they their shame, and I my fame, attain by death. Live, gentle Marius, to revenge my ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... "I have no remembrance of the time when I began to learn Greek," writes Mill, "I have been told that it was when I was three years old." Latin was not begun until his eighth year. By that time he had read in Greek,—AEsop, the Anabasis, the whole of Herodotus, the Cyropaedia, the Memorabilia, parts of Diogenes Laertius, and of Lucian, Isocrates; also six dialogues of Plato. An equipment like this suggests the satiric ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... three and ninepence; a pair of kid slippers, thirteen and sixpence; ribbons were one and sixpence. [Footnote: Do., Account of Mrs. Marion Nicholas with Tillford, 1802. On this bill appears also a charge for Hyson tea, for straw bonnets, at eighteen shillings; for black silk gloves, and for one "Aesop's Fables," at a cost of three shillings and ninepence.] The blacksmith charged six shillings and ninepence for a new pair of shoes, and a shilling and sixpence for taking off an old pair; and he did all the iron ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... worn; but it stamps with disgrace the affluent monks of the fifteenth century, who, while they could afford to buy, in the year 1470,[237] some thirty volumes with a Seneca, Ovid, Claudian, Macrobius, AEsop, etc., among them, and who found time to transcribe twice as many more, thought not of restoring their bible tomes, or adding one book of the Holy Scripture to their crowded shelves. But alas! monachal piety ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... and satirical invectives are fathered." Pamphlet is an extended use of Old Fr. Pamphilet, the name of a Latin poem by one Pamphilus which was popular in the Middle Ages. The suffix -et was often used in this way, e.g., the translation of AEsop's fables by Marie de France was called Ysopet, and Cato's moral maxims had the title Catonet, or Parvus Cato. Modern Fr. pamphlet, borrowed back from English, has always the sense of polemical writing. In Eng. libel, lit. "little book," we see a similar restriction of meaning. A ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... the 139th Guardian, has given us the story of Androcles and the Lion. He prefaces it by saying that he has no regard "to what AEsop has said upon the subject, whom," says he, "I look upon to have been a republican, by the unworthy treatment which he often gives to the king of beasts, and whom, if I had time, I could convict of falsehood and forgery in ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... Aesop, who lived 572 B.C., was the author of some fables which have been translated into nearly every language in the world, and have served as a model for all subsequent writings of the same kind. In 322 B.C., the centre of learning ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... muscles are too strong to let him become over-influenced, as Ravel and Stravinsky seem to be by the morbidly fascinating—a kind of false beauty obtained by artistic monotony. However, we cannot but feel that he would weave his spell over us—as would the Grimms and Aesop. We feel as much under magic as the "Enchanted Frog." This is part of the artist's business. The effect is a part of his art-effort in its inception. Emerson's substance and even his manner has little to do with a designed effect—his thunderbolts or delicate fragments are flashed out regardless—they ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... of the Fables of AEsop,"—thus says Montaigne in his charming essay "Of Books"(7)—"have several senses and meanings, of which the Mythologists choose some one that tallies with the fable. But for the most part 't is only what presents ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... some twenty years more: "AEsop Smith" was one dark evening creeping up a hill after a hard ride on his grey mare Brenda, when he was aware of two rough men on the tramp before him, one of whom needlessly crossed over so that they commanded both sides, and soon seemed to be approximating; ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Life of AEsop, ascribed to Planudes Maximus, a monk of Constantinople in the fourteenth century, and usually prefixed to the Fables, says that he was 'the most deformed of all men of his age, for he had a pointed head, flat nostrils, a short ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... I can say, or anybody else can say, it will be the manner of some people to give up meeting other people socially. I am very sorry for them, but I cannot help it. All I can say is that they will be sorry before they are done. I wish they would read Aesop's fable about the old man and his sons and the bundle of rods. I wish they would find out definitely why God gave them tongues and lips and ears. I wish they would take to heart the folly of this constant struggle in which they ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... find copious translations from the ancient classics, as Caesar, Appian, Plutarch, Plautus, Sallust, Aesop, Justin, Boethius, Apulius, Herodian, affording strong evidence of the activity of the Castilian scholars in this department. Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. pp. 406, 407.—Mendez, Typographia ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... AESOP'S FABLES. Illustrated. Boston: D. Lothrop & Co. Price, $1.00. These stories, though they were told more than two thousand years ago, and have been printed in hundreds of different editions, still retain their pristine charm, and the children ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... something to remind us of the town crier, and his ding-dong bell! Look! look at that great cloth spread out in the air, pictured all over with wild beasts, as if they had met together to choose a king, according to their custom in the days of AEsop. But they are choosing neither a king nor a president; else we should hear a most horrible snarling! They have come from the deep woods, and the wild mountains, and the desert sands, and the polar snows, only to do homage to my little Annie. As we enter among them, the great elephant ...
— Little Annie's Ramble (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... mistress. Winifrede liked to lead, and was never very ready to adopt other people's opinions; it was improbable that she would listen readily to the views of an Intermediate, even of one whom she was patronizing. A head girl is somewhat in the position of the lion in AEsop's fables: it is unwise to offend her. Knowing Winifrede's disposition, Marjorie dared not risk a breach of the very desirable intimacy which at present existed between them. She yearned, however, for a confidante. The burden of her ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... deceive the sharpest eye: Nor wonder how his fortune sunk, His brothers fleece him when he's drunk. I own the moral not exact, Besides, the tale is false, in fact; And so absurd, that could I raise up, From fields Elysian, fabling AEsop, I would accuse him to his face, For libelling the four-foot race. Creatures of every kind but ours Well comprehend their natural powers, While we, whom reason ought to sway, Mistake our talents every day. The Ass was never known so stupid, To act the part of Tray or Cupid; ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... gave a vase (a crater), a stand or support for it, and a strainer, to the Sigeans for the Prytaneum." The second, which says, "I also am the gift of Phanodicus," repeating the substance of the former inscription, adds, "if any mischance happens to me, the Sigeans are to mend me. AEsop and his brethren made me." The lower inscription is the more ancient. It is now nearly obliterated. Kirchhoff considers it to be not later ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... could recall events and scenes back to the time when he was only 4 years of age. His first childish experiment occurred about that time, due to his being greatly impressed by the story of the "Fox and the Pitcher" in AEsop's Fables. Finding a jar standing in the yard outside their house, he promptly proceeded to pour a small quantity of water into it, and then added a handful of small stones. The water not rising to the surface, as it did in the fable, he found a spade and scraped up a mixture of earth and ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... evenings, and by the light of the fire under the boiling kettles of lye, try to read Aesop's fables in Latin, and I never to this day take up my old Latin reader without seeming to hear the steady drip-drop ...
— The Youth's Companion - Volume LII, Number 11, Thursday, March 13, 1879 • Various
... everything but taking care of his precious body, and thereby giving his precious soul the chance of being in very bad company, and following the fate of poor Tray, and of the well-meaning stork in Dr. Aesop's fable. What shall he, or rather, what can he, do with his leisure? For leisure more or less almost every young man has,—and it is of young men, and especially of the very young men, that we are benevolently writing. If he dwell in an inland town, the boat-club ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... so greedy of paradox, that they, in fact, aspire to be Christians and infidels at the same time. Proclaiming the miracles of Christianity to be illusions of imagination or mythical legends,—the inspiration of its records no other or greater than that of Homer's 'Iliad,' or even 'Aesop's Fables;'—rejecting the whole of that supernatural clement with which the only records which can tell us any thing about the matter are full; declaring its whole history so uncertain that the ratio of truth to error must be a vanishing fraction;—the ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... met, deliberated, and disbanded, but the tidings announced in Lilienthal's epistle did not prove to be good. In one of the fables of Kryloff, the Russian AEsop, we are told that once a swan, a pike, and a crab, decided to make a trip together. No sooner had they started than, in accordance with their nature, the swan began to fly, the pike to shuffle along, the crab to crawl backward. It was so with the ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... restriction of Lincoln's boyhood and his infrequent contact with schoolhouses, it is well to remember that he managed nevertheless to read every book within twenty miles of him. These were not many, it is true, but they included "The Bible," "Aesop's Fables," "Pilgrim's Progress," "Robinson Crusoe," and, a little later, Burns and Shakespeare. Better food than this for the mind of a boy has never been found. Then he came to the history of his own country since the Declaration of Independence and mastered ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... In Aesop, we are told, a boy, Who was his mother's pride and joy, At school a primer stole one day, And homeward then did ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... river cows for coolness stand. And sheep for breezes seek the lofty land, A youth whom AEsop taught that every tree, Each bird and insect, spoke as well as he, Walk'd calmly musing in a shaded way, Where flowering hawthorn broke the sunny ray, And thus instructs his moral pen to draw A scene that obvious ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... continues its grave walk in the same direction as if it had never been rudely interrupted. At that instant a hare darts across an open glade and disappears in the thick undergrowth. What a country! AEsop's Fables in real life, where hares and tortoises ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... inferior to Shakespeare's Hamlet, resembled it in many ways. This likeness has caused scholars to suspect that Kyd wrote the early Hamlet; and their suspicions are strengthened by an ambiguous and apparently punning allusion to AEsop's Kidde in the passage by Nash mentioned above. A crude and brutal German play on the subject has been discovered, which is believed by many to be a translation of Kyd's original tragedy. If this is true, it shows how enormously ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken |
