Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Northrop Frye
Northrop Frye Quotes
151 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
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.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
The twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent, better trained, had more languages, had a better sense of proportion, and were infinitely more accurate scholars and competent professional men than I. I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
Belief has nothing to do with knowledge, & credo ut intelligam [I believe in order that I might understand] is horseshit.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
Metaphor is the language of immanence; metonymy of transcendence.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
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.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
An open mind, to be sure, should be open at both ends, like the food pipe, and have a capacity for excretion as well as intake.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
Even the biggest book is fragmentary: to finish anything, you have to cut your losses. Nobody every writes his dream book.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
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.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
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.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
Historically, a Canadian is an American who rejects the Revolution.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writerenters intoa structure of traditional stories and images.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he can exploit; for the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
Northrop Frye
Source
Report...
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.
Northrop Frye
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Northrop Frye
Born:
July 14, 1912
Died:
January 23, 1991
(aged 78)
Bio:
Herman Northrop Frye was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.
Most used words:
literature
art
human
criticism
book
life
bible
people
imagination
time
man
nature
god
experience
knowledge
Northrop Frye on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Northrop Frye Quotes
Northrop Frye Short Quotes
Quotes about Northrop Frye
Canadian Critic Quotes
Critic Quotes
20th-century Critic Quotes
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes