From Fables
In the fable of The Tortoise and the Hare, the hare is so confident of its speed, and so happy with its progress, that it squanders its lead by wasting time and ignoring the tortoise it is racing against. Eventually, despite the hare's enormous head start, the tortoise wins the race.
Read more about this topic: Law Of The Handicap Of A Head Start, Examples
Famous quotes containing the word fables:
“My dream thou brok’st not, but continued’st it.
Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice
To make dreams truths and fables histories;
Enter these arms, for since thou thought’st it best
Not to dream all my dream, let’s act the rest.”
—John Donne (1572–1631)
“The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past,—as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,—the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)