What is history but a fable agreed upon?

classic quote by Napoleon Bonaparte
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All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.

quote by Walt Disney
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Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton
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A fable is a bridge that leads to truth.

Arabian proverbs
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Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.

quote by Hypatia
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A fable is a bridge which leads to truth.

Arabian proverbs
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Napoleonic Fable

A fable that’s agreed upon
according to Napoleon
is what we should call history,
but ascribe its mystery
to recollections that are wrong
of brief events stretched into long,
in contrast to the brief report
that should, like our own lives, be short.

About this poem’s serious moral
A good historian would not quarrel:
Your history, if you are able
to write it up, is just a fable.

Napoleon once asked rhetorically: “What is history but a fable that is agreed upon? ”

1/3/10

poem by Gershon Hepner
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How many things we held yesterday as articles of faith which today we tell as fables.

quote by Michel de Montaigne
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How many things which served us yesterday as articles of faith, are fables for us today.

quote by Michel de Montaigne
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Labor is the fabled magician's wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune.

quote by James Weldon Johnson
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I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break.

quote by Jeanette Winterson
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There is nothing in the world more shameful than establishing one's self on lies and fables.

quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Did universal charity prevail, earth would be a heaven, and hell a fable.

quote by Charles Caleb Colton
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I directed a piece of theater in Italy. We took nine fables from the town and we created a play.

quote by Vincent Schiavelli
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The fabled musk deer searches the world over for the source of the scent which comes from itself.

quote by Ramakrishna
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Life is eating us up. We shall be fables presently. Keep cool it will be all one a hundred years hence.

quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Whosoever counts these Lays as fable, may be assured that I am not of his mind.

quote by Marie de France
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Who is born of a cat will run after mice. (An illusion to one of Aesop's fables.)

French proverbs
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A liar is not believed when he speaks the truth. [Fable of boy and wolf.]

Latin proverbs
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Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth - often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

quote by Hypatia
Added by Simona Enache
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