Fable 2 Quotes

History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?

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.

Hermes smiled. "I knew a boy once ... oh, younger than you by far. A mere baby, really." Here we go again, George said. Always talking about himself. Quiet! Martha snapped. Do you want to get set on vibrate? Hermes ignored them. "One night, when this boy's mother wasn't watching, he sneaked out of their cave and stole some cattle that belonged to Apollo." "Did he get blasted to tiny pieces?" I asked. "Hmm ... no. Actually, everything turned out quite well. To make up for his theft, the boy gave Apollo an instrument he'd invented-a lyre. Apollo was so enchanted with the music that he forgot all about being angry." So what's the moral?" "The moral?" Hermes asked. "Goodness, you act like it's a fable. It's a true story. Does truth have a moral?" "Um ..." "How about this: stealing is not always bad?" "I don't think my mom would like that moral." Rats are delicious, suggested George. What does that have to do with the story? Martha demanded. Nothing, George said. But I'm hungry. "I've got it," Hermes said. "Young people don't always do what they're told, but if they can pull it off and do something wonderful, sometimes they escape punishment. How's that?

Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me — the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love — He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us — nature did it all — not the gods of the religions. [October 2, 1910, interview in the NY Times Magazine]

There are some things that can’t be carved from a person, no matter how far from home they’ve sailed.

Because you and I have cursed ourselves, Fable. We will always have something to lose. I knew it that day in Tempest Snare when I kissed you. I knew it in Dern when I told you that I loved you.

Napoleon once said, "What is history, but a fable agreed upon?" He smiled. "By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account.

That I’d loved him with the same fire that I’d hated him. That if anything happened to Saint, a part of me would be taken with him.

They (fables) teach us that human beings learn and absorb ideas and concepts through narrative, through stories, not through lessons or theoretical speeches.

It was one long series of tragically beautiful knots that bound us together.

stories were merely fables to illustrate the dangers of falling in love.

I didn’t plan to be a father. I didn’t want to be one. But the first time I held you in my hands, you were so small. I had never been so terrified of anything in my life. I feel like I’ve barely slept since the night you were born.

Love is a fiction, a fable, an ode spun by poets and drunks, a fantastical tale told across one thousand and one nights, it is the genie in the bottle, it is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it's the lie designed to seduce you.

Kvothe looked at Bast for a long moment. “Oh Bast,” he said softly to his student. His smile was gentle and sad. “I know what sort of story I’m telling. This is no comedy.” “This is the end of the story, Bast. We all know that.” Kvothe’s voice was matter-of-fact, as casual as if he were describing yesterday’s weather. “I have led an interesting life, and this reminiscence has a certain sweetness to it. But . . .” Kvothe drew a deep breath and let it out gently. “. . . but this is not a dashing romance. This is no fable where folk come back from the dead. It’s not a rousing epic meant to stir the blood. No. We all know what kind of story this is.

The moral?” Hermes asked. “Goodness, you act like it’s a fable. It’s a true story. Does truth have a moral?

You have to make the best of whatever story you were born into, and if your story happens to suck ass, well, maybe you can do some good before you go.

I’m like the dog with a bone who crossed a low bridge in the fable. I see another dog passing beneath me carrying a bone, and I snap to take his bone—and drop my own into the water, into my reflection.

Now I was the girl who’d found her own way. And I also had something to lose.

He props his elbow on the table, absently scratches his temple with his index finger, and I remember exactly what that index finger did to me earlier. How he circled my nipples with that finger, how he slipped it between my legs, drenched it with my wetness and then brought it up to his mouth, licking it, tasting me, his gaze never leaving mine…

I knew all the time that it was all nonsense, but I couldn't understand in the least what it meant, or who was pulling the wires of rumour, or their purpose in so pulling. I began to wonder whether the pressure and anxiety and suspense of a terrible war had unhinged the public mind, so that it was ready to believe any fable, to debate the reasons for happenings which had never happened.

After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving away to deductions and other forms of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement.

Maybe because it never occurred to me that it could be enough just to live, as happily as you can, for as long as you have.

United we stand, divided we fall.

The first time I’d seen his darkness and every time he’d seen mine. We were salt and sand and sea and storm.

Not stories told by wolf or man to frighten children, of Wolfbane and of werewolves, of grasht and goblins and of silly vampires, fables to frighten cowards with the threat of evil and of sin. But the power that lives beyond those stories, and makes them strong indeed, that lives in nightmares and in sleep. That is ribbed into the very fabric of conscious being. The power of love and hate.

My mother looked at me then, with something in her eyes I’d never seen before. A reverence. As if something marvelous and at the same time harrowing had just happened. She blinked, pulling me between her and Saint, and I burrowed in, their warmth instantly making me feel like a child again.

I am the slave of what I have spoken, but the master of what I conceal.

Why such a massacre had occurred, the Omegans could only speculate. Some thought it may have been to stop a large-scale emigration out of America to a fabled Utopian society; others wondered if it was intended to create fear in the populace – fear of cults, fear of Communism, fear of anything foreign; and still others believed it was to create a precedence whereby any groups labelled a cult would be vilified without due diligence by the public.

Mother Nature has given us some defense mechanisms: as in Aesop’s fable, one of these is our ability to consider that the grapes we cannot (or did not) reach are sour. But an aggressively stoic prior disdain and rejection of the grapes is even more rewarding. Be aggressive; be the one to resign, if you have the guts.

You are going to be the end of me. And I would gladly face oblivion to have her look at me just like this.

When you save someone, sometimes they save you right back.

So the fables are all true. Venin coming out of the Barrens, sucking the land dry of magic, moving city to city.

The longest way round is the shortest way home”2 is the logic of both fable and of faith.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

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

He knew that he wielded magic as well as iron, and yet looked away from it, and made himself fables to explain his own presence in the world, and sought gods who might be more powerful than himself. It would be very comfortable if there were someone more powerful than himself, on this Road, on this particular morning, someone to guide him, even someone to blame....

I pray that the world never runs out of dragons. I say that in all sincerity, though I have played a part in the death of one great wyrm. For the dragon is the quintessential enemy, the greatest foe, the unconquerable epitome of devastation. The dragon, above all other creatures, even the demons and the devils, evokes images of dark grandeur, of the greatest beast curled asleep on the greatest treasure hoard. They are the ultimate test of the hero and the ultimate fright of the child. They are older than the elves and more akin to the earth than the dwarves. The great dragons are the preternatural beast, the basic element of the beast, that darkest part of our imagination. The wizards cannot tell you of their origin, though they believe that a great wizard, a god of wizards, must have played some role in the first spawning of the beast. The elves, with their long fables explaining the creation of every aspect of the world, have many ancient tales concerning the origin of the dragons, but they admit, privately, that they really have no idea of how the dragons came to be. My own belief is more simple, and yet, more complicated by far. I believe that dragons appeared in the world immediately after the spawning of the first reasoning race. I do not credit any god of wizards with their creation, but rather, the most basic imagination wrought of unseen fears, of those first reasoning mortals. We make the dragons as we make the gods, because we need them, because, somewhere deep in our hearts, we recognize that a world without them is a world not worth living in. There are so many people in the land who want an answer, a definitive answer, for everything in life, and even for everything after life. They study and they test, and because those few find the answers for some simple questions, they assume that there are answers to be had for every question. What was the world like before there were people? Was there nothing but darkness before the sun and the stars? Was there anything at all? What were we, each of us, before we were born? And what, most importantly of all, shall we be after we die? Out of compassion, I hope that those questioners never find that which they seek. One self-proclaimed prophet came through Ten-Towns denying the possibility of an afterlife, claiming that those people who had died and were raised by priests, had, in fact, never died, and that their claims of experiences beyond the grave were an elaborate trick played on them by their own hearts, a ruse to ease the path to nothingness. For that is all there was, he said, an emptiness, a nothingness. Never in my life have I ever heard one begging so desperately for someone to prove him wrong. This is kind of what I believe right now… although, I do not want to be proved wrong… For what are we left with if there remains no mystery? What hope might we find if we know all of the answers? What is it within us, then, that so desperately wants to deny magic and to unravel mystery? Fear, I presume, based on the many uncertainties of life and the greatest uncertainty of death. Put those fears aside, I say, and live free of them, for if we just step back and watch the truth of the world, we will find that there is indeed magic all about us, unexplainable by numbers and formulas. What is the passion evoked by the stirring speech of the commander before the desperate battle, if not magic? What is the peace that an infant might know in its mother’s arms, if not magic? What is love, if not magic? No, I would not want to live in a world without dragons, as I would not want to live in a world without magic, for that is a world without mystery, and that is a world without faith. And that, I fear, for any reasoning, conscious being, would be the cruelest trick of all. -Drizzt Do’Urden

Thirty-six years later the Dutchman Abel Tasman was sent to look for the fabled South Land and managed to sail 2,000 miles along the underside of Australia without detecting that a substantial land mass lay just over the left-hand horizon.

The castle was as silent as some pole-axed monster. Inert, breathless, spread-eagled. It was a night that seemed to prove by the consolidation of its darkness and its silence the hopelessness of any further dawn. There was no such thing as dawn. It was an invention of the night's or of the old-wives of the night - a fable, immemorially old - recounted century after century in the eternal darkness; retold and retold to the gnomic children in the tunnels and the caves of Gormenghast - a tale of another world where such things happened, where stones and bricks and ivy stems and iron could be seen as well as touched and smelt, could be lit and coloured, and where at certain times a radiance shone like honey from the east and the blackness was scaled away, and this thing they called dawn arose above the woods as though the fable had materialized, the legend come to life. It was a night with a bull's mouth. But the mouth was bound and gagged. It was a night with enormous eyes, but they were hooded.

This might go down as the most surreal experience of my life. Brennan is alive. Venin, dark wielders I’d thought only existed in fables, are real. Brennan is alive. Aretia still stands, even though it was scorched after the Tyrrish rebellion six years ago.

Our house was an old Tudor mansion. My father was very particular in keeping the smallest peculiarities of his home unaltered. Thus the many peaks and gables, the numerous turrets, and the mullioned windows with their quaint lozenge panes set in lead, remained very nearly as they had been three centuries back. Over and above the quaint melancholy of our dwelling, with the deep woods of its park and the sullen waters of the mere, our neighborhood was thinly peopled and primitive, and the people round us were ignorant, and tenacious of ancient ideas and traditions. Thus it was a superstitious atmosphere that we children were reared in, and we heard, from our infancy, countless tales of horror, some mere fables doubtless, others legends of dark deeds of the olden time, exaggerated by credulity and the love of the marvelous. ("Horror: A True Tale")

Ugh! You’re impossible.” I paced back and forth, the rising fury burning my cheeks. “Honestly, Ragnar Whatever-Your-Surname-Is, you’re the most infuriating man I’ve met in a very long time, and that’s saying something. I’ve met some real arseholes.” He sketched a bow. “I aim to please.

because everybody knows that happily is never really ever after. The truth is buried in the phrase itself, if you look it up. The original version was “happy in the ever after,” which meant something like “hey, everybody dies and goes to heaven in the end, so does it really matter what miseries and disasters befall us on this mortal plane?” Cut out two little words, cover the gap with an -ly, and voilà: The inevitability of death is replaced by the promise of endless, rosy life.

In Mere Christianity, no less than in his more fantastical works, the Narnia stories and science fiction novels, Lewis betrays a deep faith in the power of the human imagination to reveal the truth about our condition and bring us to hope. “The longest way round is the shortest way home”2 is the logic of both fable and of faith.

The moral?" Hermes asked. "Goodness, you act like it's a fable. It's a true story. Does the truth have a moral?" "Um..." "How about this: stealing is not always bad?" "I don't think my mom would like that moral." 'Rats are delicious,' suggested George. 'What does that have to do with the story?', Martha demanded. 'Nothing', George said. 'But I'm hungry.

If I had anyone skilled enough to make it, I wouldn’t have commissioned you, Ezra.

The world is a nectar-filled cup And we but gobbling flies. Some hang on the lip and modestly sup While others gorge up to their eyes.

Your Majesty, the formula for all human unhappiness is simple yet almost universally ignored: ‘Expectation, nondelivery!

The map is not the territory. You have to experience the journey, not predetermine it with your frankly useless assumptions about what it might or might not entail.

Enough to think that Truth can be: come sit we where the roses glow, Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to unknow. Sir Richard Burton, The Kasidah

Yeah. Does that disappoint you?” He gazed up at my dragon’s powerful form. When he spoke, his voice was full of awe. “I’ve never been happier to be so incredibly wrong.

I’ve found that fairy tale locks are inclined to pop open at the first sign of narrative agency).

Wooden 1: "How many kinds of guns have you meatheads created?" Gun Shop Clerk: "Thousands. Hundreds of thousands?" Wooden 2: "That's extravagance beyond credulity." Wooden 3: "Are there really that many different kinds of people you need to kill?

The mirror showed me you, out of all the possible people in all the universes,' It sounds almost like an apology. 'Why?' 'Well, what were you doing at the time?' 'I was looking into the mirror, obviously. Wishing for a way out.' 'Well, so was I. As it happens.

She had no idea, no better than my kitten, as to how she would survive in this kingdom of her enemies. She must have thought that George was her savior. But not for long. Nobody knows quite what happened after that; but something went wrong with George’s agreeable plan to own both Neville girls and keep their enormous fortune to himself. Some say that Richard, visiting George’s grand house, met Anne again—his childhood acquaintance—and they fell in love, and that he rescued her like a knight in a fable from a visit that was nothing less than imprisonment.

I gave in because I was weak and broken and disgusted with myself. I had nothing left. I’d given it all to my family. Every scar, every rape, every scream. I’d done it all for them. Was it so wrong to want something of my own? A split-second release? A blistering second of freedom?

[Fables] teach us that human beings learn and absorb ideas and concepts through narrative, through stories, not through lessons or theoretical speeches. This is what any of the religious texts teach us. They're all tales about characters who must confront life and overcome obstacles, figures setting off on a journey of spiritual enrichment through exploits and revelations. All holy books are, above all, great stories whose plots deal with the basic aspects of human nature, setting them within a particular moral context and a particular framework of supernatural dogmas.

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.

With the blanket pulled up all the way to her chest, and the silence that still pervaded her every breath, she could definitely have been mistaken for a Victorian heroine; the Lily Maid, thought Marjan, on her way out of Camelot's reign. Tennyson's poem had been a favorite of Marjan's when she was younger; she had learned it in high school in Tehran, during a particularly spirited semester of English literature. Still, it took a minute for her to remember the story's fateful outcome: the Lady of Shalott had not made it alive out of the fabled kingdom; she had left on her death barge, floating on a dark river.

I’ll tell you what’s groan-worthy. That man you’re so insistent on keeping at arm’s length did have a room here. You know what he did when you arrived looking like something the cat dragged in? Well, he said to me, ‘Nilsa, I’d like Lilia to have my room. I run hot, like my ancestors, and so I’m just fine sleeping out in the cold.’ Bet you didn’t know he gave up his room for you, now did ya?

The author of Eros and Psyche, Lucius Apuleius, an initiate of the ancient mystery schools touched on the knowledge of the soul to achieve union with the Divine, by the agency of a spiritual love. Lucius Apuleius lived in Carthage, and his name was still mentioned 200 years after his death in this North African city; until St. Augustine, the most influential writer of Catholicism came along. Through the centuries Christianity flourished, and the esoteric wisdom went into obscurity, along with the story of Eros and Psyche. The story deals with subjects the church frowns upon, having a direct contact with the immortal soul, and connecting with the esoteric divine, and not the divine of the Catholic church. Up until this present moment, it's not a coincidence the story of Eros and Psyche has been considered a child's fable for almost 2,000 years.

Thinking about publishing something before you’d written it was like the classic Aesop fable of the milkmaid who imagines spending all the money she’ll earn from selling her milk, even as she carries that milk to market, the distraction of which causes her to trip and spill it, thereby ending all of her visions of acclaim, praise, and self-worth. Such people, Anna thought, did not deserve to cry over their spilt milk, but they cried anyway. They cried a lot. Through Jake she had met so many unpublished writers, and they were bitter people, but the irony was that they remained bitter even if they did manage to publish. Now they were just bitter about other things: reviews and marketing attention from their publishers, invitations to festivals, places at colonies like the one she’d visited a year and a half earlier, all of the magic fairy dust that a few books and authors received, and most books and authors did not.

it’s impossible to reconcile the idea of a benevolent creator with a life that looks like this. To convince yourself the one above cares, when there’s so much horror and hurt and hate in the world. Only the blind can look into hellfire and smile. Only the coward raises a fist to his child and calls it love. And I was reminded of that time I spoke to Patience, then. Her little dead bird cupped in her palms. Her questions about why he died. I told you it’s hard to explain death to your child, vampire, but in truth, it’s impossible to explain any of this to anyone. So we settle. For the myth of the grand plan. For the fable of the God who loves us. We teach ourselves to believe in the lie, that all of it will make sense once we die. “But in truth, there’s no truth to any of it. We suffer because he wants it. We hurt because he wills it. We die because he likes it. And if there is a plan, coldblood, then this is the extent of it.” Gabriel waved at the walls; the dark stone around them and empty night beyond. “A world on its knees. Begging for just one moment of mercy. Bleeding its miserable last into the mouths of the monsters his own fucking son created.

He threw me in a basement. He has a strangling problem. But he’s different now. He’s changing...

They know it is all false. Their beliefs. The fanciful tales and fables and miracles of the past written down in ancient texts. They know deep down it is all nonsense. Yet still they believe. And the cycle of madness and delusion will never cease. It just doesn’t matter. Destroy all scripture? I think not. Everything can be redone. Everything is endless. The disfunction and folly will go on until mankind . . . until mankind is no more.

Jesinia brings me The Unabridged History of the First Six the next day, which is not only a three-hundred-year-old text but marked Classified in the endpapers, and I keep my side of the deal, handing over The Fables of the Barren.

love was the cruelest prison of all.

I can’t let you go because I’d rather die with you at my side than alone. I’m not lonely while you’re here. That’s why you can’t go. Why you can never go. You’re mine.

Life at court is no plush of pillows, but a writhing skein of snakes, each slithering about (forgive the metaphor) to capture reward and advancement. In short, my delightful regiment of helpers – courtiers, advisers, counselors, boon companions, call them what you will – need a boost of attention from me at some point in their career, either in hard cash or public honour equivalent – medals, robes, land, gifts, scrolls, titles and the like.

Lived in virtue, loved his brothers, Never drank the blood of others.

Justice and fairness, not religion or atheism, are required for the protection of the State. Jami

Like many great leaders, he loved the sweet theory of power and was less enamoured of the grisly details of its execution, though he never neglected them.

If I serve you for desire of heaven, deny me heaven. If I serve you from fear of hell, thrust me into hell. Rabia

But the first time I held you in my hands, you were so small. I had never been so terrified of anything in my life. I feel like I’ve barely slept since the night you were born.

The man who will demand ten signatures upon a promissory note and look askance at you if you tell him of interplanetary distances, will swallow any idle fable, no matter how absurd, if it be boldly asserted and surrounded with sufficient nonsensical mummery and labeled as a religion.

Chain! Chain you! What! Run you not, then, just where you please, and when?” “Not always, sir; but what of that?” “Enough for me, to spoil your fat! It ought to be a precious price which could to servile chains entice; for me, I’ll shun them while I’ve wit.” So ran Sir Wolf, and runneth yet.

It happens all the time: a cause is proposed to make you swallow the news and make matters more concrete. After a candidate’s defeat in an election, you will be supplied with the “cause” of the voters’ disgruntlement. Any conceivable cause can do. The media, however, go to great lengths to make the process “thorough” with their armies of fact-checkers. It is as if they wanted to be wrong with infinite precision (instead of accepting being approximately right, like a fable writer).

The original version was “happy in the ever after,” which meant something like “hey, everybody dies and goes to heaven in the end, so does it really matter what miseries and disasters befall us on this mortal plane?” Cut out two little words, cover the gap with an -ly, and voilà: The inevitability of death is

His eyes flashed. “Interesting theory. You must have spent all night thinking about me to come up with it.” The warmth in my cheeks deepened. “You’re deflecting.” “Am I wrong, darling?” “Am I?” I countered.

everybody knows that happily is never really ever after. The truth is buried in the phrase itself, if you look it up. The original version was “happy in the ever after,” which meant something like “hey, everybody dies and goes to heaven in the end, so does it really matter what miseries and disasters befall us on this mortal plane?” Cut out two little words, cover the gap with an -ly, and voilà: The inevitability of death is replaced by the promise of endless, rosy life.

But as she'd grown, and kissed enough boys to realize that no kiss could be worth dying for, Tella started to suspect the stories were merely fables to illustrate the dangers of falling in love.

He released Avenay, and she stepped back, standing instinctively close to Enid, whose wings curled in, protecting her.

who often stayed up late reading - that was saying something

And there was something more to it, too - that dark pain...hiding

the first genuine smile I'd seen in days lit up its face, brightening the dim grey sky. "This must seem ridiculous to you

Is it some kind of witch insult?

Enough fodder to fill all the nightmares of all the children of the world

I guessed libraries weren't designed for clandestine affairs

stoodAloof from streets, encompass’d with a wood.Dryden.2. Applied to persons, it often insinuates caution and circumspection. Turn on the bloody hounds with heads of steel,And make the cowards stand aloof at bay.Shak.Henry VI. Going northwards, aloof, as long as they had any doubt of being pursued, at last when they were out of reach, they turned and crossed the ocean to Spain.Bacon. The king would not, by any means, enter the city, until he had aloof seen the cross set up upon the greater tower of Granada, whereby it became Christian ground.Bacon’sHen. VII. Two pots stood by a river, one of brass, the other of clay. The water carried them away; the earthen vessel kept aloof from t’other.L’Estrange’sFables. The strong may fight aloof; Ancæus try’dHis force too

My blood runs cold. Her savage stare and bloodied hands leave no doubts in my mind as she glares up at us from across the battlefield. This must be the fabled Queen of the Picts.

Fable is... Faithful Amazing Beautiful Loving Exquisite I'm sorry -Drew

APOLOGUE  (A'POLOGUE)   n.s.[.]Fable; story contrived to teach some moral truth. An apologue of Æsop is beyond a syllogism, and proverbs more powerful than demonstration.Brown’sVulgar Errours. Some men are remarked for pleasantness in raillery; others for apologues and apposite diverting stories.Locke.   APOLOGY  (APO'LOGY)   n.s.[apologia, Lat.    Defence; excuse. Apology generally signifies rather excuse than vindication, and tends rather to extenuate the fault, than prove innocence. This is, however, sometimes unregarded by writers. In her face excuseCame prologue; and apology too prompt;Which with bland words at will she thus address’d.Milton’sParad. Lost,b. ix. l. 854.2. It has for before the object of excuse. It is not my intention to make an apology for my poem: some will think it needs no excuse, and others will receive none.Dryden’sPref. toAbs. and Achit. I shall neither trouble the reader, nor myself, with any apology for publishing of these sermons; for if they be, in any measure, truly serviceable to the end for which they are designed, I do not see what apology is necessary; and if they be not so, I am sure none can be sufficient.Tillotson.   APOMECOMETRY  (APOMECO'METRY)   n.s.[   from, l  distance, and lesqex, to measure.]The art of measuring things at a distance.  

Most of Jesus’ parables are story parables, a distinctively Jewish form. Fables (cf. the plant fable in Jdg 9:8–15) existed in a range of cultures, including Greek culture, but most of Jesus’ parables are closer to the human story parables that appear in rabbinic sources, sources that sometimes reflect earlier traditions. In earlier sources, both prophets (2Sa 12:1–7; Isa 5:1–7) and Jewish apocalyptic writers (e.g., 1 Enoch 1:2–3; 37–71) used some parables. Although later rabbinic parables are more stereotypical, they share with Jesus’ parables even some standard figures (e.g., a king representing God, sometimes throwing a banquet for his son, and the like). Because most of Jesus’ hearers were rural Galileans, Jesus’ stories tend to be more agrarian and less addressed to the elite than were later rabbinic parables. Jesus’ parables, unlike those of the rabbis, also tend to subvert traditional values, sometimes in shocking ways. Like later rabbis, Jesus apparently sometimes recycled or reapplied more traditional story lines, as Jesus’ parables sometimes resemble other ancient Jewish stories.

Change the game: 1. Adjust the arena. 2. Re-rig the rules. 3. Attack the plan. Change the story: 1. Describe the alternative. 2. Organize in narratives. 3. Make your fight a fable. Change the equation: 1. Act exponentially. 2. Act reciprocally. 3. Perform your power.

The Apostle Peter mentions it as what gave them (the apostles) good and well grounded assurance of the truth of the gospel, that they had seen the divine glory of Christ, 2 Pet. i. 16: “For we have not followed cunningly devised fables when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” The apostle has respect to that visible glory of Christ which they saw in his transfiguration: that glory was so divine, having such an ineffable appearance and semblance of divine holiness, majesty and grace, that it evidently denoted him to be a divine person.

My father sat ensconced in his chair like a fabled god. Tall, strong, immovable. But I saw through his illusion and despaired.

Why is it you intense political types insist on living entirely in the symbolic world?

A cat’s paw. It’s an old fable. The monkey wanted some chestnuts that were roasting in the hot coals inside the fireplace. So he convinced the cat to get them out for him, promising to share them. The cat reached his paw in and scooped out the chestnuts one by one. And as each chestnut was removed, the monkey gobbled it up. The cat was left with nothing but a burnt paw. He was used by a cleverer creature at great expense to himself.” “Now

For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables. 2 Timothy 4:3-4

2. What is your family’s top priority—rallying cry—right now?