Fables Quotes

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.

~ Thomas Aquinas

‎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.

But though I might fill the world with dragons I never had the slighest real doubt that heroes ought to fight with dragons. I must stop to challenge many child-lovers for cruelty to children. It is quite false to say that the child dislikes the fable because it is moral. Very often he likes the moral more than the fable. Adults are reading their own weary mockery into a mind still vigorous enough to be entirely serious.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Nostalgia is a necessary thing, I believe, and a way for all of us to find peace in that which we have accomplished, or even failed to accomplish. At the same time, if nostalgia precipitates actions to return to that fabled, rosy-painted time, particularly in one who believes his life to be a failure, then it is an empty thing, doomed to produce nothing but frustration and an even greater sense of failure.

~ R.a. Salvatore

The dreams of childhood—its 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, for the least among them rises to the stature of a great Charity in the heart, suffering the little children to come into the midst of it, and to keep with their pure hands a garden in the stony ways of this world

~ Charles Dickens

Some women have kissed—and some are kissing—a lot of frogs, even though the very first man that they have each kissed was and is still a prince.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Baba Yaga: ... What are his powersMirror on the wall: He reads

~ Bill Willingham

Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing.

~ John Cheever

I believe that children in this country need a more robust literary diet than they are getting. …It does not hurt them to read about good and evil, love and hate, life and death. Nor do I think they should read only about things that they understand. '…a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.' So should a child’s. For myself, I will never talk down to, or draw down to, children.(from the author's acceptance speech for the Caldecott award)

~ Barbara Cooney

Outbreaks of unvarnished truths in the backyard of our true self can be very precious and inspiring, even though we might inconsistently be tempted to give in to the exhilarating perfume of fables and fairy tales or to flattering praise and fiction. (The day the mirror was talking back)

~ Erik Pevernagie

Without stories, we’d have even more trouble recognizing what’s real.

~ Amy Neftzger

How can I tell a story we already know too well? Her name was Africa. His was France. He colonized her, exploited her, silenced her, and even decades after it was supposed to have ended, still acted with a high hand in resolving her affairs in places like Côte d'Ivoire, a name she had been given because of her export products, not her own identity.Her name was Asia. His was Europe. Her name was silence. His was power. Her name was poverty. His was wealth. Her name was Her, but what was hers? His name was His, and he presumed everything was his, including her, and he thought be could take her without asking and without consequences. It was a very old story, though its outcome had been changing a little in recent decades. And this time around the consequences are shaking a lot of foundations, all of which clearly needed shaking.Who would ever write a fable as obvious, as heavy-handed as the story we've been given?...His name was privilege, but hers was possibility. His was the same old story, but hers was a new one about the possibility of changing a story that remains unfinished, that includes all of us, that matters so much, that we will watch but also make and tell in the weeks, months, years, decades to come.

~ Rebecca Solnit

. . . the mysteries, on belief in which theology would hang the destinies of mankind, are cunningly devised fables whose origin and growth are traceable to the age of Ignorance, the mother of credulity.

~ Edward Clodd

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth — often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

~ Hypatia

What did the mat say to the door? You must be really aDOORable to open up to everyone who knock at you. And I welcome everyone and what do I get? People stepping all over me

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms.

~ Khaled Hosseini

We, peopling the void air, make gods to whom we impute the ills we ought to bear.

~ Titus Lucretius Carus

Because When you write about people, you inevitably offend--but if you write about animals, the evil do not recognize themselves but the good understand immediately.

~ Erica Jong

Wrath crawled out from the well,on direction from Hell,to get back what it once lost.With vengeance in mind,it set out to find,a specified soul to accost.When the Hell-well beckoned,Mother’s will now reckoned,her dead soul now wholly enslaved.Embodied in a rotting husk,the corpse reeked of putrid musk,her being wholly depraved.

~ A. Lee Brock

Science has never killed or persecuted a single person for doubting or denying its teaching, and most of these teaching have been true; but religion has murdered millions for doubting or denying her dogmas and most of these dogmas have been false.All stories about gods and devils, of heavens and hells, as they do not conform to nature, and are not apparent to sense, should be rejected without consideration. Beyond the universe there is nothing and within the universe the supernatural does not and cannot exist.Of all deceivers who have plagued mankind, none are so deeply ruinous to human happiness as those imposters who pretend to lead by a light above nature.The lips of the dead are closed forever. There comes no voice from the tomb. Christianity is responsible for having cast the fable of eternal fire over almost every grave.

~ Gratis P. Spencer

In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.

~ Guillermo Del Toro

Somebody's been feeding the boy fables. Probably the king's niece. Humph. Nice girl. Too many romantic notions, though.

~ Patrick W. Carr

What do you know of the Knights?” he asked. Fin shrugged. “I thought knights were only in children’s stories until a few days ago.” Jeannot smiled. “A man could do worse than to live in the stories of a child. There is, perhaps, no better remembrance.” “Until the child grows up and finds out the stories aren’t true. You might be knights, but I don’t see any shining armor,” Fin said. Jeannot stopped near the gate of the auberge and faced her. “Each time a story is told, the details and accuracies and facts are winnowed away until all that remains is the heart of the tale. If there is truth at the heart of it, a tale may live forever. As a knight, there is no dragon to slay, no maiden to rescue, and no miraculous grail to uncover. A knight seeks the truth beneath these things, seeks the heart. We call this the corso. The path set before us. The race we must run.

~ A.s. Peterson

I have come to your group for somewhere to belong, I promise I shall adapt before too long, I will accept anything you ask me to, I have come a long way, I have run away from home''But you are not like us', the pigeon said to her'You cannot come and pretend you do,Pack your bags and go somewhere new,You can't even sing our song, This is not your home'All the other pigeons stopped talking and staredAnd their looks made it clear that they also sharedThat Romy could no longer stay and Romy felt there was no other wayBut to accept and fly away.

~ Elise Icten

They all went to Bobbi and tried to reasonThey told him because of the cold winter, it was a bad seasonThey pleaded with Bobbi and asked if he could shareas they wouldn't survive if he didn't careBobbi laughed at them and zoomed even louder'What a bunch of losers', he thought even prouderSome bees died and the rest flew awayTo another field far, far away

~ Elise Icten

One day, Billy sat homeafter work and prayed,'Why oh why did you create methis way?The lion looked at Billy and answered,'first, you must love yourself. Be proud of yourself and jnow you are just as perfect as me.' 'Do not climb over others to reach your height. The more gentle you are, the more others will lift you up.'Billy like this answer and thanked the giraffe.'You are as big and as strong as me. Your job in the dungs is not easy. You have your own unique skills. Be in service and help others.' Billy liked this answer and thanked the elephant.

~ Elise Icten

our situation reminded me of a fable I had read somewhere. Chased by a tiger, a man slips and falls over the edge of a mountain. As he falls, he manages to grab a bush growing by the side of the mountain and hangs on to it for dear life. The bush is laden with wild strawberries that hang tantalizingly near his mouth. As the tiger snarls above his head and a gorge stretches beneath his dangling feet, the man takes a bite from a luscious berry. ‘How sweet,’ he exclaims as he relishes its taste.I do not remember the moral attached to the fable. It might have been a commentary on the ephemeral nature of life, on how foolish it is to imagine that there is happiness to be found in the world when death is certain and likely to happen at any time. Or it might have been an exhortation to seize the day and squeeze the most out of every moment, for, in any case, we areall going to die. It might have made a reasonably good ad for strawberries, which were so good that you simply had to eat them, even if it was the last thing you did.

~ Indu Muralidharan

The piano—that, too, was an adventure. A little girl tried to learn to play it. Her mother insisted, forced her to sit there and practice. Nothing came of it; stubbornness won out in the end, the stubbornness that protects us from the will of others, that defends our right to live our life the way we want. Even if it means life will turn out worse than anyone planned, will turn into a poor life—but it'll be one's own, however it is, even without music, even without talent.

~ Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

The priest's lesson: beware the Nightlord, for his pleasure is a mortal's doom. My grandmother's lesson: beware love, especially with the wrong man.

~ N.k. Jemisin