Top 108 Quotes & Sayings by Northrop Frye

Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.

The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.

Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I know no other country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.

It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.

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.

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.

Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.

Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.

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

One of the most obvious uses of literature, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance... Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them also as possibilities.

The Bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along can settle on it.

This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.

Everything that happens in the Old Testament is a "type" or adumbration of something that happens in the New Testament, and the whole subject is therefore called typology, though it is a typology in a special sense.

I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society.

Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.

There is a curious law of art... that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination.

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

Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.

The bedrock of doubt is the total nothingness of death. Death is a leveler, not because everybody dies, but because nobody understands what death means.

A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.

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.

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

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

It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question "Who am I?" than by some such riddle as "Where is here?

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

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.

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

We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.

Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading.

The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.

The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions.

I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.

The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment.

Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quitewell developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what I mean.

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

The fact that creative powers come from an area of the mind that seems to be independent of the conscious will, and often emerge with a good deal of emotional disturbance in their wake, provides the chief analogy between prophecy and the arts... Some people pursue wholeness and integration, others get smashed up, and fragments are rescued from the smash of an intensity that the wholeness and integration people do not reach.

There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.

Even the human heart is slightly left of centre.

Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.

The objective world is the order of nature, thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense experience, and words are the servomechanisms of reflection.

In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.

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.

Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.

Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of

A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.

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.

Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.

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.

We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.

It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and were we have to surrender precision for flexibility.

A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.