Aesops Fables Quotes

Most of Aesop's fables have many different levels and meanings. There are those who make myths of them by choosing some feature that fits in well with the fable. But for most of the fables this is only the first and most superficial aspect. There are others that are more vital, more essential and profound, that they have not been able to reach. ~ Michel De Montaigne

I was brought up, as a lot of kids are, on 'Aesop's Fables,' 'Brothers Grimm,' 'La Fontaine,' all those sorts of things. Hans Christian Andersen is a hero of mine. ~ Michael Morpurgo

Freedom should not be sold for all the gold in the world ~ Walter Anglicus , Aesop's Fables

My parents read to me a lot as a kid, and I started writing very early, probably spurred on by Aesop's fables. Then they gave me The Lord of the Rings way too early for me to fully understand what I was reading, which was actually kind of cool. It was almost better - comprehension's overrated when you're reading. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

The way some people read the parables reminds me of Aesop's Fables. And the way others read them reminds me of the way some discern clue after perplexing clue in their Beatle albums as evidence for a cover-up of Paul's having died in a car accident. ~ Jared C. Wilson

Sometimes the slow ones blame the active for the delay. ~ Aesop

When I was a kid, the book that I liked the most was 'Aesop's Fables.' There was a version of it that my father read stories to us kids out of. I liked the idea of the short story format. ~ Mark Mothersbaugh

The Summer Garden, perhaps the most beautiful garden in Petersburg, had the particular advantage of being almost next to the Embassy. Originally laid out by Leblond, in the manner of Versailles, its most remarkable feature was a series of fountains, with statuary depicting scenes from Aesop's Fables. ~ Alan Sheridan

Trickster foxes appear in old stories gathered from countries and cultures all over the world
including Aesop's Fables from ancient Greece, the "Reynard" stories of medieval Europe, the "Giovannuzza" tales of Italy, the "Brer Fox" lore of the American South, and stories from diverse Native American traditions. ~ Terri Windling

The fable of Christ and his twelve apostles is a parody of the sun and the twelve signs of the Zodiac, copied from the ancient religions of the Eastern world. Every thing told of Christ has reference to the sun. His reported resurrection is at sunrise, and that on the first day of the week; that is, on the day anciently dedicated to the sun, and from thence called Sunday. ~ Thomas Paine

If you choose bad companions, no one will believe that you are anything but bad yourself. ~ Aesop

So when or you or I are made A fable, song, or fleeting shade; All love, all liking, all delight Lies drowned with us in endless night. Then while time serves, and we are but decaying; Come, my Corinna, come, let's go a Maying. ~ Robert Herrick

I had been poor myself, and knew what awaited him in the world. He would find that they who fawned on him most would be first to turn their backs on him now. He would be rudely disillusioned regarding the fables of love and friendship, and would become cynical, bitter, and sceptical of there being any disinterested good in human nature. ~ Miles Franklin

Under the desert sun, in the dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist. The air is clean, the rock cuts cruelly into flesh; shatter the rock and the odor of flint rises to your nostrils, bitter and sharp. Whirlwinds dance across the salt flats, a pillar of dust by day; the thornbush breaks into flame at night. What does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore, sublime. ~ Edward Abbey

It is interesting to observe with what singular unanimity the farthest sundered nations and generations consent to give completeness and roundness to an ancient fable, of which they indistinctly appreciate the beauty or the truth. By a faint and dream-like effort, though it be only by the vote of a scientific body, the dullest posterity slowly add some trait to the mythus. As when astronomers call the lately discovered planet Neptune; or the asteroid Astr ~ Henry David Thoreau

READ. You have no business wanting to be a writer unless you are a reader. You should read fantasies and essays, biographies and poetry, fables and fairy tales. Read, read, read, read, read. ~ Kate DiCamillo

These are stories you hear ... of people sitting in a mall and being spotted, and you think it will happen to you. And when you're fresh off the boat, and new in Bombay, you want those kind of things! They are magical fables. You want to, somewhere, be a part of it, something people will read about. But reality is different. ~ Nimrat Kaur

CHILDHOOD I That idol, black eyes and yellow mop, without parents or court, nobler than Mexican and Flemish fables; his domain, insolent azure and verdure, runs over beaches called by the shipless waves, names ferociously Greek, Slav, Celt. At the border of the forest - dream flowers tinkle, flash, and flare, - the girl with orange lips, knees crossed in the clear flood that gushes from the fields, nakedness shaded, traversed, dressed by rainbow, flora, sea. Ladies who stroll on terraces adjacent to the sea; baby girls and giantesses, superb blacks in the verdigris moss, jewels upright on the rich ground of groves and little thawed gardens, - young mothers and big sisters with eyes full of pilgrimages, sultanas, princesses tyrannical of costume and carriage, little foreign misses and young ladies gently unhappy. What boredom, the hour of the "dear body" and "dear heart." II ~ Arthur Rimbaud

If thou trusteth to the book called the Scriptures, thou trusteth to the rotten staff of fables and falsehood. ~ Thomas Paine

Mathematical problems, or puzzles, are important to real mathematics (like solving real-life problems), just as fables, stories and anecdotes are important to the young in understanding real life ~ Terence Tao

Yeah, well my heart bleeds for you: You know what they say. The only easy day was yesterday ~ Bill Willingham

I'm surprised a person with your experience in telling elaborate fables should have difficulty in thinking up such a simple tale, but I suppose it's a different issue when you have to think quickly rather than spend time thoroughly developing your story."
"I'm sure that's it," she replied blithely, cutting her bacon into small bits."I'm also sure that my skills will grow over time. I just need to practice, practice, practice. Did I ever tell you about the dragon I owned when I was a child? ~ Karen Hawkins

The dreams of childhood - it's airy fables, its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond; so good to be believed in once, so good to be remembered when outgrown ... ~ Charles Dickens

Through the imagination and the human sense of creativity, the book will examine not only raw clinical data but philosophical perspectives as well. As within many moral fables, animals will be used, at times, to convey a a fundamental truth of human nature. More simply stated, animals that elicit human empathetic responses, will be examined in a religious context.
So, starting with cats, dogs and ultimately other primates, as moral experiments of imagination, we can perhaps understand differing cognitive processes that could have shaped our religious purview. It might be even stated that they should shape our opinion, especially in a reevaluation of the spiritual present and coming future. When this happens, it will help humanity create a unique pristine outlook on its religious traditions. ~ Leviak B. Kelly

... it wasn't pretend, I wasn't in a fairytale or a fable. I shut my eyes and absorbed the silent whoomp that always accompanies this revelation. It's the sound of the real world, gigantic and impossible, replacing the smaller version of reality that I wear like a bonnet, clutched tightly under my chin. ~ Miranda July

Fables take off from the severity of instruction, and enforce it at the same time that they conceal it. ~ Joseph Addison

Be aware of this truth that the people on this earth could be joyous, if only they would live rationally and if they would contribute mutually to each others' welfare.
This world is not a vale of sorrows if you will recognize discriminatingly what is truly excellent in it; and if you will avail yourself of it for mutual happiness and well-being. Therefore, let us explain as often as possible, and particularly at the departure of life, that we base our faith on firm foundations, on Truth for putting into action our ideas which do not depend on fables and ideas which Science has long ago proven to be false. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The undersigned pointed out that nothing was required of a pastor except that he intimate in church at the dead man's bier his date of birth and date of death and thereafter say some little prayer or other, even if it were only the Lord's Prayer; and finally sprinkle the State's three spadefuls of earth with the statutory innocent phrases, Earth to earth, etc., as is the custom.

Pastor Jón Prímus: That's not so innocent as it looks. It derives from those scholastics. They were always doing their utmost to falsify Aristotle, though he was quite bad enough already. They tried to feed the fables with yet more fables, such as that the primary elements of matter first disintegrate and then reassemble to resurrect. They lied so fast in the Middle Ages they hadn't even time to hiccup. ~ Halldor Laxness

Avoid a remedy that is worse than the disease. ~ Aesop

All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon ~ Voltaire

Nobody sees the obvious, nobody observes the ordinary. There are more miracles in a square yard of earth than in all the fables of the Church. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

There are not too many fables about man's misuse of sunflower seeds. ~ Richard Brautigan

Oh this is reality, not a fable, that the Lord Jesus Christ is our friend. And we should not be satisfied until we are brought to this. ~ George Muller

Why, exactly, are scientists supposed to accord "respect" to a bunch of ancient fables that are not only ludicrous on their face, but motivate so much opposition to science? ~ Jerry A. Coyne

Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper. ~ Salman Rushdie

I can't move. I'm paralyzed in the middle of the street, like the donkey in that Aesop's fable who couldn't choose between the bales of hay. They'll find me in years to come, still frozen to the spot, clutching my credit card. ~ Sophie Kinsella

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets - Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included - breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. ...
Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature?
...
I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild.
...
The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. ~ Henry David Thoreau

As geographers, Sosius, crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect, that beyond this lies nothing but sandy deserts full of wild beasts, unapproachable bogs, Scythian ice, or a frozen sea, so, in this work of mine, in which I have compared the lives of the greatest men with one another, after passing through those periods which probable reasoning can reach to and real history find a footing in, I might very well say of those that are farther off, beyond this there is nothing but prodigies and fictions, the only inhabitants are the poets and inventors of fables; there is no credit, or certainty any farther. ~ Plutarch

Memorable stories of every culture tell us what principles the citizenry saved their smiles for and shed their sorrowful tears lamenting. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Whether in cave paintings or the latest uses of the Internet, human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable. We are inveterate storytellers. ~ Beeban Kidron

Let us be thankful for the fools,' Mark Twain wrote with typically dark humor in 1897. 'But for them the rest of us could not succeed.' Of all the paradoxes of failure in America, surely this is the darkest. Long ago, we saw through old fables of rags to riches; it is still fun to dream, but we know that we are partaking of a cultural myth. But if we do not quite believe in that kind of success, our faith in the myths of failure is unshaken. We are merrily cynical about whether the average tycoon really tugged on those bootstraps, but we still believe with deadly seriousness that the reasons for failure are usually individual-- "in the man." Failure is not the dark side of the American Dream; it is the foundation of it. The American Dream gives each of us the chance to be a born loser. ~ Scott A. Sandage

We are not afraid of predators, we're transfixed by them, prone to weave stories and fables and chatter endlessly about them, because fascination creates preparedness, and preparedness, survival. In a deeply tribal way, we love our monsters ... ~ E. O. Wilson

My feelings-let's hold on to this idea of them as shuffling Victorians, let's make them servants, an entire uniformed household staff- were fresh, raw, perpetually startled.They weren't sensible. But they behaved themselves for a while. They were frank, earthy even, among themselves; but they were discreet. They were invisible, I wasn't even required to know their names. I underestimated their docility and overestimated my own power, and like all fables about arrogance, this one turned menacing. ~ Joan Wickersham

We do not just fear our predators, we are transfixed by them. We are prone to weave stories and fables and chat endlessly about them. ~ Peter Benchley

Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables, yet we never quite give up the hope of finding them. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith

Doth some one say that there be gods above? There are not; no, there are not. Let no fool, Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you. Look at the facts themselves, yielding my words No undue credence: for I say that kings Kill, rob, break oaths, lay cities waste by fraud, And doing thus are happier than those Who live calm pious lives day after day All divinity Is built-up from our good and evil luck. ~ Euripides