Northrop Frye - Human Quotes

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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.

Northrop Frye
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.

Northrop Frye
The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.

Northrop Frye
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.

Northrop Frye
Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.

Northrop Frye
The operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power, formulas that become a focus of mental activity.

Northrop Frye
No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself.

Northrop Frye
The book is the most efficient technological instrument for learning that has ever been devised by the human mind.

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

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
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
Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.

Northrop Frye
The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.

Northrop Frye
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