Fable 2 Quotes

But as the work proceeded I was continually reminded of the fable about the elephant and the tortoise. Having constructed an elephant upon which the mathematical world could rest, I found the elephant tottering, and proceeded to construct a tortoise to keep the elephant from falling. But the tortoise was not more secure than the elephant, and after some twenty years of very arduous toil, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do in the way of making mathematical knowledge indubitable. ~ Bertrand Russell

The moral of a fable is eternal. The moral of a story is temporary to a story. ~ Yann Martel

Normal' is a bedtime story-a fable-that humans tell themselves to feel better when faced with overwhelming evidence that most of what's happening around them is not 'normal' at all. ~ Deborah Harkness

In the farsighted words of Thomas Jefferson, writing to his predecessor, John Adams, 'The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. ~ Richard Dawkins

In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark. ~ Cormac McCarthy

They are angry with me, because I know what I am." Said the little eagle. "How do you know that they are angry with you?" "Because, they despise me for wanting to soar, they only want me to peck at the dirt, looking for ants, with them. But I can't do that. I don't have chicken feet, I have eagle wings." "And what is so wrong with having eagle wings and no chicken feet?" Asked the old owl. "I'm not sure, that's what I'm trying to find out." "They hate you because you know that you are an eagle and they want you to think you are a chicken so that you will peck at the ground looking for ants and worms, so that you will never know that you are an eagle and always think yourself a chicken. Let them hate you, they will always be chickens, and you will always be an eagle. You must fly. You must soar." Said the old owl. ~ C. JoyBell C.

Jacqueline Carey has created a postmodern fable of enormous scope and force. Santa Olivia is at once a cautionary tale of people caught in a web of lies and creeping terror, and a love song to the beauty and power of being different. At the novel's heart is the kind of grace Carey is known for: an illumination of the strength that lies hidden inside all of us. ~ Eric Van Lustbader

Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk rejection, ridicule and failure. As you follow the quest for stories told with meaning and beauty, study thoughtfully but write boldly. Then, like the hero of the fable, your dance will dazzle the world. ~ Robert McKee

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

To have nobody is to have not even yourself. Somebody loving you provides a certificate of existence. When a person feels alone, he can't exist without some small social fable. ~ Yasmina Reza

For all things fade and turn to fable, and quickly too, utter oblivion covers them like sand. ~ Marcus Aurelius

This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a 'certain Chinese encyclopaedia' in which it is written that 'animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies'. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that. ~ Michel Foucault

There is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's and every being's face. Physiognomy, like every other human science,is but a passing fable. ~ Herman Melville

When her muzzle grew more white than brown, the chipmunk forgot that she and the squirrel had had nothing to talk about. She forgot the definition of "jazz" as well and came to think of it as every beautiful thing she had ever failed to appreciate: the taste of warm rain; the smell of a baby; the din of a swollen river, rushing past her tree and onward to infinity. ~ David Sedaris

What is history but a fable agreed upon?
Napoleon Bonaparte ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction. ~ Voltaire

As to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours, that is on no ground credible. Even if some unknown landmass is there, and not just ocean, there was only one pair of original ancestors, and it is inconceivable that such distant regions should have been peopled by Adam's descendants. ~ Saint Augustine

It was a season known for the macabre nature in humans to manifest, a night thought to thinly veil the fabric of dimensions…of course all of which – despite whether being true or fable, caused others to have eerie reactions. ~ John F. Montagne

And when life's sweet fable ends,
Soul and body part like friends;
No quarrels, murmurs, no delay;
A kiss, a sigh, and so away. ~ Richard Crashaw

With his pendulous penis swinging from side to side, the beast clip-clopped up a rickety flight of stairs led by Pablo Zapata's wife, who took him through a beaded curtain into a room where a bevy of sullen women reclined on tatty sofas. A collective gasp rang out among the group and many crossed themselves in silent prayer. ~ Kevin Ansbro

The single combats of the heroes of history or fable amuse our fancy and engage our affections: the skillful evolutions of war may inform the mind, and improve a necessary, though pernicious, science. But in the uniform and odious pictures of a general assault, all is blood, and horror, and confusion ... ~ Edward Gibbon

While it is not always profitable to analogize fact to fiction, La Fontaine's fable of the crow, the cheese, and the fox demonstrates that there is a substantial difference between holding a piece of cheese in the beak and putting it in the stomach. ~ Felix Frankfurter

All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable. ~ Walt Disney

A text from Fable and it says one word. Marshmallow ~ Monica Murphy

THE WITCH.
[dancing].

O I shall lose my wits, I fear,
Do I, again, see Squire Satan here!

MEPHISTOPHELES.
Woman, the name offends my ear!

THE WITCH.
Why so? What has it done to you?

MEPHISTOPHELES.
It has long since to fable-books been banished;
But men are none the better for it; true,
The wicked one, but not the wicked ones, has vanished. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I do not believe the fable that men read travel books to escape from reality: they read to escape into it, from a crazy wonderland of armaments, cant, political speeches at once insincere and illiterate, propaganda, and social injustice which the lunacy of humanity has constructed over a period of years. ~ Alex Comfort

So now, how did God produce this world? ... The fable is that he breathed upon us. In his breath, his wind, came moisture and things began to grow ... a message of hope. Nothing physical. How do you intend for your breath to become a work of art? The only way I can see it is that you prevent your breath from becoming a structure. As soon as your breath takes on the form of a room, you are a carpenter; you're not God. ~ Milton Resnick

That's an animal fable about humility. If you survive your mistake, you must learn from it. Accept that you're fragile, vulnerable, and sometimes stupid. Realize that you're not immortal and you've got to take care of yourself. And then laugh it off and fly away. ~ Marc Maron

To the Nightingale


On what secret night in England

Or by the incalculable constant Rhine,

Lost among all the nights of my nights,

Carried to my unknowing ear

Your voice, burdened with mythology,

Nightingale of Virgil, of the Persians?

Perhaps I never heard you, yet my life

I bound to your life, inseparably.

A wandering spirit is your symbol

In a book of enigmas. El Marino

Named you the siren of the woods

And you sing through Juliet's night

And in the intricate Latin pages

And from the pine-trees of that other,

Nightingale of Germany and Judea,

Heine, mocking, burning, mourning.

Keats heard you for all, everywhere.

There's not one of the bright names

The people of the earth have given you

That does not yearn to match your music,

Nightingale of shadows. The Muslim

Dreamed you drunk with ecstasy

His breast trans-pierced by the thorn

Of the sung rose that you redden

With your last blood. Assiduously

I plot these lines in twilight emptiness,

Nightingale of the shores and seas,

Who in exaltation, memory and fable

Burn with love and die melodiously. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

In Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks, we read: "An oyster opens wide at full moon. When the crab sees this, it throws a pebble or a twig at the oyster to keep it from closing and thus have it to feed upon." Da Vinci adds the following suitable moral to this fable: "Like the mouth that, in telling its secret, places itself at the mercy of an indiscreet listener. ~ Gaston Bachelard

Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original. ~ Anthony Doerr

-Too often college Bible classes end up like this-

With eager knife that oft has sliced
At Gentile gloss, or Jewish fable,
Before the crowd you lay the Christ
Upon the lecture table.

From bondage to the old beliefs
You say our rescue must begin,
But I want refuge from my griefs
And saving from my sin.

The strong, the easy and the glad
Hang, blandly listening, on your word;
But I am sick, and I am sad,
And I want Thee, O Lord.

(From Amy Carmichael's 1950 bio of Thomas Walker of Tinnevelly, India - poem written in about 1905 by Canon Ainger) ~ Canon Ainger

grave monsters of fable in deeps of the ferny forest danced minuets that witches had made of their whims and their laughter, long ago long ago in their youth before cities had come to the world. And the trees of the forest heavily lifted slow roots out of the ground and swayed upon them uncouthly and then danced as on monstrous claws, and the insects danced on the huge waving leaves. And in the dark of long caverns weird things in enchanted seclusion rose out of their age-long sleep and danced in the damp ~ Lord Dunsany

Despite the strength of the feminist movement in the 1970s and beyond, a fable has persisted that educated women are rejected as marriage partners. ~ Karen DeCrow

Thank-you, son,' said his father. 'I want you to know we're both
proud of you. Take care, and keep in touch if you can.'
'Or even better, visit!' said his mother, 'our home isn't complete
without you! ~ Chris Tinniswood

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

Happy the bard, (if that fair name belong
To him that blends no fable with his song)
Whose lines uniting, by an honest art,
The faithful monitors and poets part,
Seek to delight, that they may mend mankind,
And while they captivate, inform the mind.
Still happier, if he till a thankful soil,
And fruit reward his honorable toil:
But happier far who comfort those that wait
To hear plain truth at Judah's hallow'd gate ~ William Cowper

But he had expressed to Mme. du Chatelet the hope that a way out might lie in applying philosophy to history, and endeavoring to trace, beneath the flux of political events, the history of the human mind. 'Only philosophers should write history,' he said. 'In all nations, history is disfigured by fable, till at last philosophy comes to enlighten man; and when it does finally arrive in the midst of darkness, it finds the human mind so blinded centuries of error, that it can hardly undeceive it; it finds ceremonies, facts and monuments, heaped up to prove lies.' 'History,' he concludes, 'is after all nothing but a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead;' we transform the past to suit our wishes for the future, and in the upshot 'history proves that anything can be proved by history. ~ Will Durant

At one extreme of its meaning, "myth" is fable, falsehood, or superstition. But at another, "myth" is a useful and fruitful image by which we make sense of life in somewhat the same way that we can explain electrical forces by comparing them with the behavior of water or air. Yet "myth," in this second sense, is not to be taken literally, just as electricity is not to be confused with air or water. Thus in using myth one must take care not to confuse image with fact, which would be like climbing up the signpost instead of following the road. ~ Alan W. Watts