"Australian aborigines, regarded as the rudest of savages, have a story about a giant frog who had swallowed the sea and all the waters of the world; and who was only forced to spill them by being made to laugh. All the animals with all their antics passed before him and, like Queen Victoria, he was not amused. He collapsed at last before an eel who stood delicately balanced on the tip of its tail, doubtless with a rather desperate dignity. Any amount of fine fantastic literature might be made out of that fable. There is philosophy in that vision of the dry world before the beatific Deluge of laughter. There is imagination in the mountainous monster erupting like an aqueous volcano; there is plenty of fun in the thought of his goggling visage as the pelican or the penguin passed by. Anyhow the frog laughed; but the folk-lore student remains grave."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Everlasting_Man
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
The Everlasting Man
131 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by The Everlasting Man →
Related Quotes
"The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be reall…"
"When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her childr…"
"Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough aw…"
"It is exactly when the boy gets far enough off to see the giant that he sees that he really is a giant. It is exactly…"
"But the Church, being a highly practical thing for working and fighting, is necessarily a thing for men and not merel…"
"George Wyndham once told me that he had seen one of the first aeroplanes rise for the first time and it was very wond…"
"Out of some dark forest under some ancient dawn there must come towards us, with lumbering yet dancing motions, one o…"
"I say it is better to see a horse as a monster than to see it only as a slow substitute for a motor-car. If we have g…"
"Now, as it is with the monster that is called a horse, so it is with the monster that is called a man. … the really d…"
"There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk 'round the whole world til…"