Northrop Frye Quotes

151 Sourced Quotes

Criticism... is to art what history is to action and philosophy to wisdom.

Northrop Frye
I give the impression of elusiveness sometimes, and rightly, because I really do have an inner chamber in my temple I'm not mature enough to open.

Northrop Frye
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.

Northrop Frye
The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.

Northrop Frye
Genius is a power of the soul and that powers of the soul can be developed by everyone.

Northrop Frye
We read (experience) a text linearly, forgetting most of it while we read; then we study it as a simultaneous unit.

Northrop Frye
The "flow of information," which is mostly misinformation, is actually a presentation of myths. And people are increasingly rejecting the prescribed myths & developing their own counter-myths.

Northrop Frye
Give me a place to stand, and I will include the world.

Northrop Frye
Education is a set of analogies to a genuinely human existence, of which the arts are the model. Merely human life is of course a demonic analogy or parody of genuinely human life.

Northrop Frye
Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.

Northrop Frye
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
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
My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him.

Northrop Frye
Belief has nothing to do with knowledge, & credo ut intelligam [I believe in order that I might understand] is horseshit.

Northrop Frye
Metaphor is the language of immanence; metonymy of transcendence.

Northrop Frye
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
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
Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.

Northrop Frye
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
The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.

Northrop Frye
One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.

Northrop Frye
Even the biggest book is fragmentary: to finish anything, you have to cut your losses. Nobody every writes his dream book.

Northrop Frye
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.

Northrop Frye
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.

Northrop Frye
I find it hard to understand why one should look for sermons in stones when the inability to preach is so attractive a feature of stones.

Northrop Frye
Under the stimulation of a "great age" or certain period of clarity in art a wider diffusion of genius becomes actual suggests to me that it is always potential.

Northrop Frye
We are always in the place of beginning; there is no advance in infinity.

Northrop Frye
If you haven't got an excremental vision you have no business setting up as a major satirist.

Northrop Frye
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.

Northrop Frye
We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling "life is a dream" becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it.

Northrop Frye