“Fables, like parables, are more ancient than formal arguments and are often the most effective means of presenting and impressing both truth and duty.”
Source: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1891, p. 162.
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Tryon Edwards 57
American theologian 1809–1894Related quotes

“Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers.”
142
Fruits of Solitude (1682), Part I
Context: Nothing does Reason more Right, than the Coolness of those that offer it: for Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers.

Patrick Cruttwell, in Boris Ford (ed.) Medieval Literature: Chaucer and the Alliterative Tradition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982) p. 326.
Criticism

“There is nothing more ancient than the truth.”
Source: Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics, 1995, p. 156

Source: On Nature (1874), p. 102
Context: Conformity to nature has no connection whatever with right and wrong. The idea can never be fitly introduced into ethical discussions at all, except, occasionally and partially, into the question of degrees of culpability. To illustrate this point, let us consider the phrase by which the greatest intensity of condemnatory feeling is conveyed in connection with the idea of nature - the word "unnatural." That a thing is unnatural, in any precise meaning which can be attached to the word, is no argument for its being blamable; since the most criminal actions are to a being like man not more unnatural than most of the virtues.

"The Future of Democracy"
What I Saw in America (1922)
Context: There is truth in every ancient fable, and there is here even something of it in the fancy that finds the symbol of the Republic in the bird that bore the bolts of Jove. Owls and bats may wander where they will in darkness, and for them as for the sceptics the universe may have no centre; kites and vultures may linger as they like over carrion, and for them as for the plutocrats existence may have no origin and no end; but it was far back in the land of legends, where instincts find their true images, that the cry went forth that freedom is an eagle, whose glory is gazing at the sun.