Fable quotes:

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Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
Fable has strong shoulders that carry far more truth than fact can. -- Barry Hughart
[On Napoleon assuming power in France:] The time of Fable is over, the time of History has begun. -- Josephine de Beauharnais
History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction. -- Voltaire
What is history but a fable agreed upon? -- Napoleon Bonaparte
Did universal charity prevail, earth would be a heaven, and hell a fable. -- Charles Caleb Colton
I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break. -- Jeanette Winterson
Whosoever counts these Lays as fable, may be assured that I am not of his mind. -- Marie de France
The moral of a fable is eternal. The moral of a story is temporary to a story. -- Yann Martel
All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable. -- Walt Disney
It is a myth, not a mandate, a fable not a logic, and symbol rather than a reason by which men are moved. -- Irwin Edman
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
Suspense films are often based on communication problems, and that affects all of the plot points. It almost gives it kind of a fable feeling. -- Ira Sachs
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
The minute that you bring a unicorn into a story, you know that it's a fairy tale or a fable, because unicorns don't exist as animals. They exist as fantasy creatures. -- Gloria Vanderbilt
For me, art is make-believe. It's enchantment. It's a fable. I'm enjoying that and playing with it. Of course it's serious, and art is serious, but I'm not going to rarefy it. -- Shea Hembrey
From this, without doubt, sprang the fable. Man created it thus, because it was not given him to see more than himself and nature, which surrounds him; but he created it true with a truth all its own. -- Alfred de Vigny
For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don't think makes for good literature. -- Junot Diaz
There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten - before the end is told - even if there happens to be any end to it. -- Joseph Conrad
The beautiful thing about 'The Strain Trilogy' is the ability to move from gore to high fable to creeping dread to domestic drama to unbearable suspense to the uncanny and on and on. The epic journey is designed to support these swings in mood, and that complements my tastes, which are wide-ranging. -- Chuck Hogan
India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God. -- Salman Rushdie
Wherever modern Science has exploded a superstitious fable or even a picturesque error, she has replaced it with a grander and even more poetical truth. -- George Perkins Marsh
Fiction or fable allures to instruction. -- Benjamin Franklin
History is not fable agreed upon, but truth disagreed upon. -- Ivan Panin
What profit has not that fable of Christ brought us! -- Pope Leo X
I can find my biography in every fable that I read -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I can find my biography in every fable that I read. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Bible account of the creation of Eve is a preposterous fable. -- Thomas Huxley
As we are poetical in our natures, so we delight in fable. -- William Hazlitt
Did universal charity prevail, earth would be a heaven, and hell a fable -- Charles Caleb Colton
Science Fiction has always been and will always be a fable teacher of morality. -- Ray Bradbury
The fable of a god or gods visiting the earth did not originate with Christianity. -- Richard Carlile
The artist is the child in the popular fable, every one of whose tears was a pearl. -- Heinrich Heine
Human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable. We are inveterate storytellers. -- Beeban Kidron
Still we live meanly like ants, though the fable tells us we were long ago changed into men. -- Henry David Thoreau
Read my little fable: He that runs may read. Most can raise the flowers now, For all have got the seed. -- Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Allwise Creator hath been dishonored by being made the author of fable and the human mind degraded by believing it. -- Thomas Paine
I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals. -- Margaret Atwood
The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness)." -- Christopher Hitchens
O Charidas, what of the under world?" "Great darkness." "And what of the resurrection?" "A lie." "And Pluto?" "A fable; we perish utterly. -- Callimachus
History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth. -- Jean Cocteau
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
When I was quite a boy I had a spasm of religion which lasted six weeks... But I never since have swallowed the Christian fable. -- George Meredith
I am thoroughly tired of the fable style of narrative and shall do my best to get up something entirely different and possibly little more worthy. -- George Ade
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
Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal. -- Carl Sagan
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
The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring. -- Northrop Frye
Sheer animated fantasy is still my first and deepest production impulse. The fable is the best storytelling device ever conceived, and the screen is its best medium -- Walt Disney
I have watched constantly that in our work the highest moral and spiritual standards are upheld, whether my productions deal with fable or with stories of living action. -- Walt Disney
Providence has done, and I am persuaded is disposed to do, a great deal for us; but we are not to forget the fable of Jupiter and the countryman. -- George Washington
There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured. -- Alberto Manguel
Owen [Suskind], in a sense, grew up on a diet of myth and fable, and has become an expert on their themes, which contain a moral guide that connects people. -- Roger Ross Williams
Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: It is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them. -- Gustave Le Bon
RABBLE, n. In a republic, those who exercise a supreme authority tempered by fraudulent elections. The rabble is like the sacred Simurgh, of Arabian fable - omnipotent on condition that it do nothing. -- Ambrose Bierce
A man with great talents, but void of discretion, is like Polyphemus in the fable, strong and blind, endued with an irresistible force, which for want of sight is of no use to him. -- Joseph Addison
Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners. -- Edward Abbey
The evil arising from mental improvement can be corrected only by a still further progress in that very improvement. Either morality is a fable, or the more enlightened we are, the more attached to it we become. -- Madame de Stael

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