#fables

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

#delusions #dissatisfaction #fables #indifference #jokes

You are arrogant," says the cat, "and you are in love. Either one of these things alone might be overcome, but together, they make for a stubborn combination. ↗

— Elora Bishop

#braided #elora-bishop #love #sappho-s-fables #love

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

— Patrick W. Carr

#king #romantic #romantic

I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind. ↗

— Francis Bacon

#fables #frame #had #i #legend

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

#arises #awe #because #being #big

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages is preserved into perpetuity by a nation's proverbs, fables, folk sayings and quotations. ↗

— William Feather

#experience #fables #folk #into #nation

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

#children #childrens-books #fables #lessons #literature

Omnipotence is most omnipotent when one does nothing! ↗

— Stanisław Lem

#stanislaw-lem #the-cyberiad #age

Age, like wealth is but a mental abstraction, my boy"~ Herr Doktor Pavel ↗

— K.W. Jeter

#age

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

#actions #fables #failure #frustration #necessary