Terry Eagleton Quotes

58 Sourced Quotes

Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.

Terry Eagleton
Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.

Terry Eagleton
Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.

Terry Eagleton
It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.

Terry Eagleton
Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.

Terry Eagleton
It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.

Terry Eagleton
I do not know whether to be delighted or outraged by the fact that Literary Theory: An Introduction was the subject of a study by a well known U.S. business school, which was intrigued to discover how an academic text could become a best-seller.

Terry Eagleton
All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some object.

Terry Eagleton
The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster.

Terry Eagleton
You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.

Terry Eagleton
It is silly to call fat people gravitationally challenged, a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.

Terry Eagleton
If the masses are not thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades.

Terry Eagleton
Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.

Terry Eagleton
Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it.

Terry Eagleton
Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of '68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.

Terry Eagleton
A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.

Terry Eagleton
The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.

Terry Eagleton
Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features of it and backgrounding others.

Terry Eagleton
All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill.

Terry Eagleton
Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.

Terry Eagleton
There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.

Terry Eagleton
Deconstruction... insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.

Terry Eagleton
If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.

Terry Eagleton
What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons—reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.

Terry Eagleton
Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.

Terry Eagleton
The government spokesman announces that there is no truth in the charges of widespread corruption within the Cabinet; nobody believes him; he knows that nobody believes him, we know that he knows it, and he knows it too.

Terry Eagleton
When one emphasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one always overemphasizes.

Terry Eagleton
To declare in St John's words that Jesus and the Father are one is to claim that Jesus's dependence on the Other is not self-estrangement but self-ful lment. At the core of his identity..lies nothing but unconditional love.

Terry Eagleton
As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith

Terry Eagleton
Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.

Terry Eagleton