C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Fable
History is but a fable agreed upon.
Fiction or fable allures to instruction.
A certain class of novels may with propriety be called fables.
As we are poetical in our natures, so we delight in fable.
There should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric; and pure invention is but the talent of a deceiver.
Willmott has very tersely said that embellished truths are the illuminated alphabet of larger children.
Fables take off from the severity of instruction, and enforce it at the same time that they conceal it.
All the fairy tales of Aladdin, or the invisible Gyges, or the talisman that opens kings’ palaces, or the enchanted halls underground or in the sea, are only fictions to indicate the one miracle of intellectual enlargement.
The difference between a parable and an apologue is that the former, being drawn from human life, requires probability in the narration, whereas the apologue, being taken from inanimate things or the inferior animals, is not confined strictly to probability. The fables of Æsop are apologues.