Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina
Northrop Frye
130 quotes
“I don`t want the reduction of religion to aesthetics, but the abolition of aesthetics & incorporating of art with the Word of God. (p. 7)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Genius is a power of the soul and that powers of the soul can be developed by everyone. (p. 8)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p. 8)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The soul is an immaculate virgin...Then it goes out and gets fucked by the world all day long & staggers back a baggy-eyed old whore, still hoping that after a sleep the Moment of purification will come again. (p. 27)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I had been on the hills of Bethlehem in the year one, I do not think I should have heard angels singing because I do not hear them now, & there is no reason to suppose that they have stopped.(p. 74)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nobody seriously thinks of television as a viewer's mode of perception...No matter how much he wants people to look at his product, the advertiser doesn't realize that television is [the viewer's] way of looking at him, & not his way of reaching them. (p. 95-6)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p. 97)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An aphorism is not a cliche: it penetrates & bites. It has wit, and consequently an affinity with satire...Christ speaks in aphorisms, not because they are alive, but because he is. (p. 108)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p. 149)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing is more remarkable in the Bible than the absence of argument...Argument is internal continuity. So is logical sequence in narrative: in the Bible the connectives are just "and." (p. 200)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A community`s art is its spiritual vision. (p. 206)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Belief has nothing to do with knowledge, & credo ut intelligam [I believe in order that I might understand] is horseshit. (p. 209)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In imaginative thought there is no real knowledge of anything but similarities (ultimately identities): knowledge of differences is merely a transition to a new knowledge of similarities. (p. 215)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We read (experience) a text linearly, forgetting most of it while we read; then we study it as a simultaneous unit. (p. 325)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm a Blakean, a visionary disciple...But I'm always torn between feeling that the cock crows because he has a vision of the dawn, or because he feels stimulated by standing on top of a pile horseshit. (1942, entry #24)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A literary critic of experience never defines anything. (p. 4)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Students] have to learn that ideas do not exist until they have been incorporated into words. Until that point you don’t know whether you are pregnant or just have gas on the stomach. (p. 746)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can never get rid of God as long as you continue to use words, because all words are part of the Word. (p. 871)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that everybody tries to produce what Marshall McLuhan called a ‘counter environment.’ That is, you set yourself in opposition to the kind of mass tendencies which the media set up. That’s what’s so important about the humanities in the university...There’s something of a personal dialogue between one human being and another. And the fact that this dialogue is being carried out in the teeth of all the mass emotion techniques of the electronic media is a very important side of the humanities.”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Canadian Energy: Dialogues on Creativity: Northrop Frye." Descant 12, no. 32-3 (1981).
“I have a notion that a prolonged period of solitude & fasting would produce hallucinations, & that these would be mandalas and such: they would be the essential forms in which "outer" perceptions are organized. (18.23)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Give me a place to stand, and I will include the world. (19.333)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The total simultaneous pattern always extend from alpha to omega. (21.190)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even the biggest book is fragmentary: to finish anything, you have to cut your losses. Nobody ever writes his dream book. (33.54)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[What Poets Say:]”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology. (21.101)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One should have bigger & better conversions everyday, like a mechanized phoenix. (21.495)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Metaphor is the language of immanence; metonymy of transcendence. (11C.21)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Continuous prose suggests complete identification with the representing, observing, immersing-in-object self. Aphorisms suggest a richer & varied personality made up more of internal conflicts and decisions. An epiphanic sequence suggests the highest mystery of personality. (33.47)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The particular myth that's been organizing this talk, and in a way the whole series, is the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible. The civilization we live in at present is a gigantic technological structure, a skyscraper almost high enough to reach the moon. It looks like a single world-wide effort, but it's really a deadlock of rivalries; it looks very impressive, except that it has no genuine human dignity. For all its wonderful machinery, we know it's really a crazy ramshackle building, and at any time may crash around our ears. What the myth tells us is that the Tower of Babel is a work of human imagination, that its main elements are words, and that what will make it collapse is a confusion of tongues. All had originally one language, the myth says. That language is not English or Russian or Chinese or any common ancestor, if there was one. It is the language of human nature, the language that makes both Shakespeare and Pushkin authentic poets, that gives a social vision to both Lincoln and Gandhi. It never speaks unless we take the time to listen in leisure, and it speaks only in a voice too quiet for panic to hear. And then all it has to tell us, when we look over the edge of our leaning tower, is that we are not getting any nearer [to] heaven, and that it is time to return to the earth.”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The objective world is only “material”: it’s there, but it could be there in a great many different forms and aspects...Even here there [are] still possibilities: it can’t be just anything. But perhaps extracting a finite schema from the variety of mythologies, literatures, or religions might contribute something to the understanding of what some of these possibilities could be. The individual can’t create his own world, except in art or fantasy: society can only create a myth of concern. What fun if one could get just a peep at what some of the other worlds are that a new humanity could create–no, live in. (p. 287-8)”
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) said by 1991 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source