M. H. Abrams Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.

M. H. Abrams
Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.

M. H. Abrams
The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.

M. H. Abrams
It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

M. H. Abrams
He always violated your expectations. … He was a character.

M. H. Abrams
I think the hardest thing to teach a student is that what he or she puts down on paper is changeable. It's not the final thing, it's the first thing, which may just be the suggestive, vague identification of something that you have to come back to and rewrite. At first, students tend to freeze at the first effort. The breakthrough comes when they realize that they can make it better — can identify what their purposes were and realize better ways to achieve those purposes. That is the important thing in teaching students to write: not to be frozen in their first effort.

M. H. Abrams
When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that.

M. H. Abrams
All students are capable of growth. Some of them seem to be very slow to begin with and it's probably not their fault, nor do I think it's a matter of genetics. It's a matter of what has happened in their lives before. They are all capable of growing, but they will not grow unless you interest them, captivate them in some way, and then make them reach out. Then they will finally enjoy reaching out.

M. H. Abrams
It's a pleasure that you don't outgrow the anthology.

M. H. Abrams
The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

M. H. Abrams
Pay attention to your students. Hear what they say, try to find out what their capacities are, what make sense to them. Adapt what you are doing and saying to those capacities, but make your students stretch upward. I think the trick is to adapt to the level of a student, but never rest on that level — always make them reach out. … If a student does not quite get it the first time, he or she will come back and get it later. If you don't set your writing — and teaching — at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop their intellectual muscle.

M. H. Abrams
Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you're doing. It shows you possibilities you haven't thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens you, it makes you more human. It makes life enjoyable.

M. H. Abrams
John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. I like to read Archie Ammons, my great friend. And Harold Bloom, another former student.

M. H. Abrams
One of the joys of teaching with the anthology is to watch the excitement grow as students, who may think the past dull and irrelevant, find how fresh and new and powerful are the kinds of writings that are hundreds of years old.

M. H. Abrams
If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.

M. H. Abrams
If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

M. H. Abrams
I think most of the things I published have been published out of desperation, not because they were perfected.

M. H. Abrams