“The marrow of a parable is different from the promise of its surface, and like as gold is sought for in the earth, the kernel in a nut and the hidden fruit in the prickly covering of chestnuts, so in parables we must search more deeply after the divine meaning.”
- Jerome
“Jesus of Nazareth could have chosen simply to express Himself in moral precepts; but like a great poet He chose the form of the parable, wonderful short stories that entertained and clothed the moral precept in an eternal form. It is not sufficient to catch man's mind, you must also catch the imaginative faculties of his mind.”
- Dudley Nichols
“I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.”
- Frank Capra
“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
“A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.”
- William Butler Yeats
“Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory-the world? Then we pygmies must be content to have our paper allegories.”
- Herman Melville
“Allegories drawn to great length will always break.”
- Samuel Johnson
“A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory - and very few eyes can see the mystery of his life - a life like the Scriptures - figurative.”
- John Keats
“Allegories, when well chosen, are like so many tracks of light in a discourse, that make everything about them clear and beautiful.”
- Joseph Addison
“Shakespeare led a life of allegory; his works are the comments on it.”
- John Keats
“Everything for me becomes allegory.”
- Charles Baudelaire
“There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.”
- Mark Twain
“Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews”
- John Updike
“Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.”
- Simone Weil
“It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.”
- Jack Lemon
“Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.”
- W. H. Auden
“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
“The youth and cheerfulness of morning are in happy analogy, and of powerful operation; and if the distress be not poignant enough to keep the eyes unclosed, they will be sure to open to sensations of softened pain and brighter hope.”
- Jane Austen
Give ear, O my people, to my law: incline your ears to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in a parable: I will utter dark sayings of old: which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us. We will not hide them from their children, shewing to the generation to come the praises of the LORD, and his strength, and his wonderful works that he hath done.
- Psalms 78:1-4
“Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.”
- G.K. Chesterton
“The business of the dramatist is to keep himself out of sight, and to let nothing appear but his characters. As soon as he attracts notice to his personal feelings, the illusion is broken.”
- Thomas Babington
“An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.”
- Robert Frost
“Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.”
- Joseph Campbell
“Storytellers, by the very act of telling, communicate a radical learning that changes lives and the world: telling stories is a universally accessible means through which people make meaning.”
- Chris Cavanaugh
“Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.”
- Orson Scott Card
“We know nothing of what will happen in future, but by the analogy of experience”
- Abraham Lincoln
The legs of the lame are not equal: so is a parable in the mouth of fools.
- Proverbs 26:7
“The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.”
- Jose Ortega y Gasset
“All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.”
- Walt Disney
“To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they could unwittingly help along the psychic destruction of their people.”
- Ben Okri
“All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.”
- G. K. Chesterton
“By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more and not merely to spend our feelings.”
- Arthur Miller
“The drama embraces and applies all the beauties and decorations of poetry. The sister arts attend and adorn it. Painting, architecture, and music are her handmaids. The costliest lights of a people's intellect burn at her show. All ages welcome her.”
- Robert Aris
“The drama is the looking-glass in which we see the hideousness of vice and the beauties of virtue.”
- Frances Anne
“The garden is a metaphor for life, and gardening is a symbol of the spiritual path.”
- Larry Dossey
“All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.”
- Henry David Thoreau
“God has neither form nor shape under which we can know Him; when he speaks of Himself in metaphors and similes, He is adapting Himself to our foolishness, our limited capacity.”
- Christina of Sweden
“All words, in every language, are metaphors.”
- Marshall McLuhan
“Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.”
- Samuel Butler
“A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.”
- Gore Vidal
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
- Albert Einstein
“We respond to a drama to that extent to which it corresponds to our dreamlife.”
- David Mamet
“I try to bring the audience's own drama - tears and laughter they know about - to them.”
- Judy Garland
“Children already know about dragons. What fairy tales tell children is that dragons can be slain.”
- G.K. Chesterton
“Celtic spirituality was a practice in which ordinary people in their daily lives took the tasks that lay to hand but treated them sacramentally, as pointing to a greater reality which lay beyond them. It is an approach to life which we have been in danger of losing, this sense of allowing the extraordinary to break in on the ordinary. Perhaps it is something which we can rediscover, something which Celtic spirituality can give to us if we would let it renew our vision by teaching our eyes to see again, our ears to hear, our hands to handle.”
- Esther de Waal
“He taught them many things by parables.”
- Mark 4:2 (NIV)
“In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.”
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Jesus was a brilliant Jewish stand-up comedian, a phenomenal improviser. His parables are great one-liners.”
- Camille Paglia
“You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.”
- John Adams
“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
“The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re-dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re-dreamed. Each reality can have it.”
- Ben Okri
“The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.”
- Charles Baudelaire
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Please Note: These dramas and scripts are completely FREE, but for use in illuminating Scripture, teaching the Gospel, for church, ministry and school presentations. The scripts are not for inclusion under any other byline, or for sale in any compilation. All U.S. copyright laws apply and permission should be requested from the author before using these scripts in film or video or for any commercial purpose. The author grants permission for complete ministerial use, or Vacation Bible School, or for church or school settings. Please use these scripts for good intentions, with a good heart, with a clean spirit, and may God bless you in your endeavors!
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While these scripts are completely FREE, a provision has been made for anyone wishing to donate a gift to further this Gospel Drama Ministry.
Other ways to aid this ministry include praying for this site www.DramaticParables.com, and especially www.TruthSeek.net, using the Prayer Request page to submit prayer requests, and praying for the prayer requests of others, as well as exploring the various advertisements and links (regrettably, the advertising is necessary to recompense the many costs of keeping a website running, so exploration of the advertisers, which are not connected to any of these dramas, is greatly appreciated). Any aid is joyously accepted, even if that means a smile and a well-wish. Thank you so much!
Art et Amour Toujours
Douglas Christian Larsen
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Completely free Christian scripts, sketches, and mimes.
Always a Parable. Storytelling making the Difference.
Soldier On. You were created on purpose.
You were created with a purpose, a True mission.
The Power of Words combined with
all the Amazing Colors of the Rainbow.
parable
par·a·ble [ párrəb'l ]
noun
Definition:
1. moral or religious story: a short simple story intended to illustrate a moral or religious lesson
2. story ascribed to Jesus Christ: a parable that appears in the Bible, as told by Jesus Christ
allegory
al·le·go·ry [ állə gàwree ]
noun
Definition:
1. symbolic work: a work in which the characters and events are to be understood as representing other things and symbolically expressing a deeper, often spiritual, moral, or political meaning
2. symbolic expression of meaning in story: the symbolic expression of a deeper meaning through a story or scene acted out by human, animal, or mythical characters
the poet's use of allegory
3. genre: allegories considered as a literary or artistic genre
4. symbolic representation: a symbolic representation of something
fable
fa·ble [ fáyb'l ]
noun (plural fa·bles)
Definition:
1. story that teaches lesson: a short story with a moral, especially one in which the characters are animals
2. legend: a story about supernatural, mythological, or legendary characters and events
3. false account: a false or improbable account of something
His version of events turned out to be a complete fable.
4. myths and legends: myths and legends collectively
a character out of fable
metaphor
met·a·phor [ méttə fàwr ]
noun
Definition:
1. implicit comparison: the use to describe somebody or something of a word or phrase that is not meant literally but by means of a vivid comparison expresses something about him, her, or it, e.g. saying that somebody is a snake
2. figurative language: all language that involves figures of speech or symbolism and does not literally represent real things
3. symbol: one thing used or considered to represent another
