The other would not answer directly, but he told them a little parable.

Here Goethe's little parable, as he calls it, is peculiarly applicable.

Let us, therefore, have recourse to an illustration in the shape of a little parable.

This little parable has made me outstrip my narrative.

However, every stage of his career still reads like a little parable of loyalism's choices and limitations.

Can you make out my little parable?

Around six fifteen, the captain gathers us up, gives us a little parable about what we learned here.

Thus encouraged, the girl took up her little parable again, her sweet, rather vacant, face growing almost animated as she spoke.

Like all quietists, Jalaluddin dwells on the importance of keeping the mind unclouded by anger and resentment, as in the following little parable:-

Lydia slid helplessly into the naïve question, "Well, did his father drown?" before the meaning of the little parable struck her.

This is a little parable of what the grace of God does for every sinful life that longs and cries for purity and holiness.

Her quest for happiness is interrupted by little parables about hens and swallows, honesty and pride.

These little parables, retold lucidly by the poet and translator Gabriel Rosenstock, offer an insight into a different way of viewing the world.

"Goethe," said the curate, "has a little parable about poems, which is equally true about parables-

"Our successors will think of our time as a pre-Creation eternity: our predecessors found eternity as our time unfolded." A very pretty little parable.