Fables
Though a "moral" is appended to many fables, for instance the fables of Aesop, Shah insisted that there were levels of meaning hidden in them that lay beyond the merely didactic:
- "The fables of all nations provide a really remarkable example of this, because, if you can understand them at a technical level, they provide the most striking evidence of the persistence of a consistent teaching, preserved sometimes through mere repetition, yet handed down and prized simply because they give a stimulus to the imagination or entertainment for the people at large."
Read more about this topic: Teaching Stories
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)
“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; and, therefore, God never wrought miracle to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)