The golden apple is an element that appears in various national and ethnic folk legends or fairy tales. Recurring themes depict a hero (e.g., Hercules or Făt-Frumos) retrieving the golden apples hidden or stolen by a monstrous antagonist. Alternatively, they are depicted as divine food and the source of immortality in Norse mythology.
Read more about Golden Apple: Norse Mythology, Fairy Tales, Modern Literature, Golden Apples in Other Languages, Identity
Famous quotes containing the words golden apple, golden and/or apple:
“In marble halls as white as milk,
Lined with a skin as soft as silk,
Within a fountain crystal-clear,
A golden apple doth appear.
No doors there are to this stronghold,
Yet thieves break in and steal the gold.”
—Mother Goose (fl. 17th–18th century. In marble walls as white as milk (Riddle: An Egg)
“Love’s secrets, being mysteries, ever pertain to the transcendent and the infinite; and so they are as airy bridges, by which our further shadows pass over into the regions of the golden mists and exhalations; whence all poetical, lovely thoughts are engendered, and drop into us, as though pearls should drop from rainbows.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The finished man of the world must eat of every apple at once. He must hold his hatreds also at arm’s length, and not remember spite. He has neither friends nor enemies, but values men only as channels of power.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)