Northrop Frye
The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.
The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.
In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.
Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.
Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.
It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.
Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I know no other country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.
Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.Collection: Imagination
This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.Collection: Loss
Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell.Collection: Cat
There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.Collection: Way
The fact that creative powers come from an area of the mind that seems to be independent of the conscious will, and often emerge with a good deal of emotional disturbance in their wake, provides the chief analogy between prophecy and the arts... Some people pursue wholeness and integration, others get smashed up, and fragments are rescued from the smash of an intensity that the wholeness and integration people do not reach.Collection: Art
The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.Collection: Reality
Real unity tolerates dissent and rejoices in variety of outlook and tradition, recognizes that it is man's destiny to unite and not divide, and understands that creating proletariats and scapegoats and second-class citizens is a mean and contemptible activity.Collection: Real
Even the human heart is slightly left of centre.Collection: Heart
The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.Collection: Knowledge
We are always in the place of beginning; there is no advance in infinity.Collection: Infinity
A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.Collection: Writing
Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.Collection: Animal
I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: The most conscientous student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.Collection: Doe
Literally, the Bible is a gigantic myth, a narrative extending over the whole of time from creation to apocalypse, unified by a body of recurring imagery that "freezes" into a single metaphor cluster, the metaphors all being identified with the body of the Messiah, the man who is all men, the totality logoi who is one Logos, the grain of sand that is the world.Collection: Men
Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at.Collection: Use
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.Collection: People
We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.Collection: Educational
Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.Collection: World
One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.Collection: Believe
Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.Collection: Religious
The Bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along can settle on it.Collection: Mind
The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.Collection: Civilization
We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.Collection: United States
A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.Collection: Believe
The first thing that confronts us in studying verbal structures is that they are arranged sequentially, and have to be read or listened to in time.Collection: Firsts
Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I don't know of any other country where the accountant enjoys a higher social and moral status.Collection: Country
The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible... to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent.Collection: Travel
What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.Collection: Art
The entire Bible, viewed as a "divine comedy," is contained within a U-shaped story of this sort, one in which man, as explained, loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation.Collection: Men
The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring.Collection: Fables
Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total structure.Collection: Reading
Historically, a Canadian is an American who rejects the Revolution.Collection: Revolution
We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it still with us.Collection: Writing
To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-likeCollection: Literature
Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.Collection: Copying
Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.Collection: Men
In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs.Collection: Art
Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic.Collection: Literature
No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies.Collection: Magic
It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.Collection: Block
Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.Collection: Art