Top 95 Parable Quotes
#1. Fairyland ... Paradise ... In this place and at this time, Marguerite could know that the one was a parable of the other and both were synonyms for something that had no name.
Elizabeth Goudge
#2. I'd like to be remembered as the sower of seeds. That's the greatest parable in the bible as far as I'm concerned. Some seeds fall in the pathway, get stomped on and don't grow. Some fall on the stones and don't even sprout, but others fall on the ground and multiply a thousand fold.
Pete Seeger
#3. To paraphrase Muggeridge: Everything is a parable that God is speaking to us, the art of life is to get the message.
Chester Elijah Branch
#4. If you hear an old parable and you don't believe it, it's mythology. If you hear an old parable and you believe it, it's religion.
Ray William Johnson
#5. Greed is not defined by what something costs; it is measured by what it costs you. If anything costs you your faith or your family, the price is too high. Such is the point Jesus makes in the parable of the portfolio.
Max Lucado
#6. Settle yourself down for an apocryphal bedtime story. A programmer's parable, if you will ... .
Anonymous
#7. When was the last time you heard a long passage from a novel read aloud during Sunday school or worship? Or how about the last time a youth pastor subverted his or her "talk" through satire or parable rather than proof texting the six main points? Yet
Sarah Arthur
#8. Only in the problem play is there any real drama, because drama is no mere setting up of the camera to nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man's will and his environment: in a word, of problem.
George Bernard Shaw
#9. I make a distinction between true and real. I think that the story is true, it's just not real. That's what a parable is. It takes things that we all know are real, and it takes life events that actually happen, and it weaves them into a fiction that allows truth to actually be embedded.
William P. Young
#10. The Ploughmen is part inspired fever-dream, part adventure story, a lyric parable of not just goodand evil but of the vast and beautiful and often lonely country in-between. Kim Zupan is a wonder.
Rick Bass
#11. For I suspect the next world will more plainly be a going on with this than most people think - only it will be much better for some, and much worse for others, as the Lord has taught us in the parable of the rich man and the beggar.
George MacDonald
#12. While Fledging is a different type of book, The Parable series serve as cautionary tales. I wrote the Parable books because of the direction of the country. You can call it save the world fiction, but it clearly doesn't save anything.
Octavia Butler
#13. Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#14. The better life rests less on the prohibitions of the Ten Commandments and more on the parable of the Good Samaritan and the Golden Rule.
David Josiah Brewer
#15. London the secular city instructs him: turn any corner and he can find himself inside a parable.
Thomas Pynchon
#16.
There is no justice in love ... it is only the glimpse or parable of an incomprehensible reality ... the eternal breaking in on the the temporal.
Marilynne Robinson
#18. Unlike a fairy tale, the parable provides no happy ending. Instead, it leaves us face to face with one of life's hardest spiritual choices: to trust or not to trust in God's all-forgiving love.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#19. common problem people have is discerning when a dream or vision is to be taken symbolically (as a parable) and when it is to be taken literally. As
Praying Medic
#20. At its simplest, the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt to its precise application to tease the mind into active thought.
C. H. Dodd
#21. When I am writing anything in general, I just want to tell the story that exists in my head; I don't try to write a parable or make a point.
Lauren DeStefano
#22. There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.
W. H. Auden
#23. The parable of the vineyard spoke very deeply to my heart, especially in the context of someone who has just freshly read the Old Testament from the first page to the last page of the Book of Malachi.
Timothy Sng
#25. Earthly regeneration is a parable, but just alone a parable of the things to come.
Paul Althaus
#26. Whatever is profound loves masks; what is most profound even hates image and parable.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#27. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (whose mother died ten days after she was born) wrote a novel that anticipates Semmelweis's discovery and serves as a parable for the destructive power of decaying matter.
Laura Mullen
#28. The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#29. Everything happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message. - Malcolm Muggeridge1
J. Scott McElroy
#30. If an audience kept complete silence during a challenge parable from Jesus and if an audience filed past him afterward saying, 'Lovely parable, this morning, Rabbi,' Jesus would have failed utterly.
John Dominic Crossan
#31. It is my theory that the greater truths underlying life and death can be best be understood as a parable--that is, as a fiction.
Genevieve Cogman
#32. Take for example the commencement address he [James Garfield] delivered at his alma mater Hiram College in the summer of 1880 ... The only thing stopping this address from turning into a slacker parable is the absence of the word 'dude'.
Sarah Vowell
#33. My favorite parable for living a positive and influential life is the Golden Rule: 'Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.'
Tony Oller
#34. Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.
Simone Weil
#35. Christ , in the parable of the vine dressers, has taught us a sublime lesson of justice, by showing that to the things which are not our own, we can have no just claim.
James F. Cooper
#36. Each biblical parable, for instance, tries to encode the hard-won experience of many individuals over unknown eons of time.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#37. Science fiction is never about the future, in the same way history is rarely about the past: they're both parable formats for examining or commenting on the present.
A.A. Gill
#38. Jesus' intention in this parable was to compare the only good soil to the ones that were not legitimate alternatives. To Him, there was one option for a true believer.
Francis Chan
#40. Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
Faded credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.
John Updike
#41. The teachings of Jesus begin in story and end in symbol - they begin in parable and end in us. These are not Bible stories that we learn; these are our stories.
Leonard Sweet
#42. Any moment that opens us up to the reality that life is good is a parable of the supreme end for which we were made.
Lewis B. Smedes
#43. I thought of the parable of the prodigal son. We had made merry for the beloved child's return too - but what happens when the beloved child doesn't say she's sorry? The parable doesn't talk about that. Jesus figures of course you're sorry. Jesus, I thought, you blew it. Not everybody is sorry.
Caroline B. Cooney
#44. Youth in our Sunday school class can repeat almost verbatim some obscure parable we dramatized last year, and yet they forget the core doctrinal statement we taught last week. Why is this? Why does story stick with us for so long?
Sarah Arthur
#45. Most music is metaphor, but Wolff is not. I am not metaphor either. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon.
Morton Feldman
#46. If the Prodigal Son's a parable, and if Adam and Eve are metaphors, then maybe God is just figure of speech.
Dan Barker
#47. Now the parable takes on a very personal focus. We can no longer enjoy observation without participation. We are part of the drama that is staged in this parable. Jesus came. What have we done with the truth of His message and the gift of His forgiving death?
Lloyd John Ogilvie
#48. That was my concept from the beginning - a crazy caper that's a parable for what happens in the absence of regulation.
Jake Halpern
#49. It is for this reason that Jesus left us the parable of the unfaithful servant, inviting us into a sincere fraternity in order that through it we could find the path of rehabilitation.
Chico Xavier
#50. Science fiction as a genre has the benefit of being able to act as parable, to set up a story at a remove so you can make a real-world point without people throwing up a wall in front of it.
Joe Haldeman
#51. Christian Fiction is like a parable. The story is made up, but the truth is brought to life. Enjoy the story, but savor the truth.
Mary Ann Brantley
#52. This is a little parable about cities and genres; how, while some of them lose their imaginative centrality, others take their place.
Amit Chaudhuri
#53. Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact.
Muriel Spark
#54. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#56. What I dislike about movie culture is that it often presents a parable of our problems - but the issues are all straightforward and the people are either nice or they're not. In real life, everyone falls between those perimeters, but not many American films operate in that grey area.
Julian Fellowes
#57. The symbol in the dream has more the value of a parable: it does not conceal, it teaches.
Carl Jung
#58. All that passes is raised to the dignity of expression; all that happens is raised to the dignity of meaning. Everything is either symbol or parable.
Paul Claudel
#59. An aphorism is a synthesis of poetry and prose, it is a narrative precipitate, a didactic parable, an ideological concept, in practice it 's compressed and zipped philosophy . It is literature that adapts itself to the digital age.
William C. Brown
#60. A cherry pie is ... ephemeral. From the moment it emerges from the oven it begins a steep decline: from too hot to edible to cold to stale to mouldy, and finally to a post-pie state where only history can tell you that it was once considered food. The pie is a parable of human life.
Nick Harkaway
#61. I think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption is immanent whether or not it's imminent, that the world to come is in a sense always already here, if still unavailable. I find this idea powerful for several reasons. For one thing, it's an antidote to despair.
Ben Lerner
#62. Remember: "For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, for want of a horseshoe, the horse was lost, for want of a horse, the battle was lost, for want of a battle, the war was lost." This parable should be the mantra of everyone who thinks her or his vote doesn't count.
Gloria Steinem
#63. I can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around my mouth like marbles
tabernacle and pharisee and parable, tresspass and Babylon and covenant.
Penelope Lively
#64. Our lives are like the talents in the parable of the three stewards. It is something that has been given to us for the time being and we have the opportunity and privilege of doing our best with this precious gift.
George Vaillant
#65. Is that story really true?" he asked. "Oh, no," said Michael, airily. "It is a parable. It is a parable of you and all your rationalists. You begin by breaking up the Cross; but you end by breaking up the habitable world.
G.K. Chesterton
#67. Remember the 'Parable of the Talents' in the New Testament? Christ exhorts us to be the best we can be by developing our skills and abilities, by succeeding in all our tasks and endeavors. What better description can there be of capitalism?
Margaret Thatcher
#68. You ask a question, I said, to which a reply can only be given in a parable. Yes, Socrates; and that is a way of speaking to which you are not at all accustomed, I suppose.
Plato
#69. He knows of our anguish, and He is there for us. Like the Good Samaritan in His parable, when He finds us wounded at the wayside, He binds up our wounds and cares for us (see Luke 10:34). Brothers and sisters, the healing power of His Atonement is for you, for us, for all.
Sheri L. Dew
#70. Whether in cave paintings or the latest uses of the Internet, human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable. We are inveterate storytellers.
Beeban Kidron
#72. LUK18.1 And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint;
Anonymous
#73. Christ does not save us by acting a parable of divine love; he acts the parable of divine love by saving us. That is the Christian faith.
Austin Farrer
#74. Whenever the boss has 'fun' activities, there's got to be a parable or a lesson. Employees feel like they're supposed to be taking notes.
Greg Daniels
#75. Coming Home, a story about a family that contains a beautiful parable about contemporary China.
Anonymous
#76. In church I feel very close to the publican of the parable.
Giulio Andreotti
#77. Jesus is the parable of the Father's love given to transform us so that we might be drawn into the new creation called the kingdom of God.
Stanley Hauerwas
#78. IT WOULD BE tempting to read the story of Fordlandia and Belterra as a parable of arrogance,
Greg Grandin
#79. Dr. P. may therefore serve as a warning and parable -- of what happens to a science which eschews the judgmental, the particular, the personal, and becomes entirely abstract and computational.
Oliver Sacks
#80. If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative.
Peter Morgan
#81. My mom is very religious and she said, 'Whatever you think about all the time, that's what you worship.' If that's the case I'd like everyone to pop open their Diet Coke cans and turn to page 37 of their People Magazines. In this holy scripture, we read the parable of Ms. Valerie Bertinelli.
Maria Bamford
#82. The world is a parable-the habitation of symbols-the phantoms of spiritual things immortal shown in material shape.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
#83. He who rejoices even at the stake triumphs not over pain but over the absence of pain where he had anticipated feeling it. A parable.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#84. In music, you can use metaphors with ease - if a person doesn't understand the parable, they can still enjoy the melody of the music. If, however, a person reads a book and misses the meaning of its metaphors, this will be extremely disheartening for both the reader as well as the author.
Cat Stevens
#85. Tell the truth, but understand that it is not necessarily what happened," is one of the things she told him. "Every good story is a parable," is another.
Bret Lott
#86. And I offer you this parable: Not a few who sought to cast out their devil entered into the swine themselves.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#87. First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs.
Peter Ellis
#88. Simply thinking creatively is not the same as being innovative, and only those who risk breaking out of their comfort zone by putting thought into action will discover the profusion of opportunity that exists.
Michael Lum
#89. Listen to the trees as they sway in the wind.
Their leaves are telling secrets. Their bark sings songs of olden days as it grows around the trunks. And their roots give names to all things.
Their language has been lost.
But not the gestures.
Vera Nazarian
#90. The wise man sees the fool & laughs & the fool never knows why
Jovie Sumner
#91. I could end this with a moral,
as if this were a fable about animals,
though no fables are really about animals.
Margaret Atwood
#92. The fatted calf, the best Scotch, the hoedown could all have been his too, any time he asked for them except that he never thought to ask for them because he was too busy trying cheerlessly and religiously to earn them.
Frederick Buechner
#93. Now he learned what law and order and truth are, what consent and harmony mean; how the individual may find his own end in a higher end, where law and freedom mean the same thing, and the purest certainty exists without the slightest constraint.
George MacDonald
#94. Truth will never shine from a heart filled with corruption and lies.
Suzy Kassem
#95. I follow suit, said the lion,
vacating his coat of arms
and movie logos; and the eagle said,
Get me off this flag.
Margaret Atwood
