Northrop Frye Quotes

#1. The only knowledge that is worthwhile, writes Northrop Frye. is the knowledge that leafs to wisdom, for knowledge without wisdom is a body without life.

Leland Ryken

#2. The effect of reading literary non-fiction that matters most to me is when the coin drops, and this happens in the company of the great, mercuric, encyclopedic minds: Empson, Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye.

Paul Fry

#3. For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he can exploit; for the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong.

Northrop Frye

#4. 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.

Northrop Frye

#5. 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. [p.92]

Northrop Frye

#6. Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.

Northrop Frye

#7. Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic.

Northrop Frye

#8. The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for "literalists," becomes much simpler when we read it typologically , as a mosiac of allusions to Old Testament prophecy.

Northrop Frye

#9. Even the human heart is slightly left of centre.

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

#11. 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.

Northrop Frye

#12. We do not live in centred space anymore, but have to create our own centres.

Northrop Frye

#13. What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.

Northrop Frye

#14. 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.

Northrop Frye

#15. 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

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

Northrop Frye

#17. 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. [p.93]

Northrop Frye

#18. Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.

Northrop Frye

#19. 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

Northrop Frye

#20. The motive for metaphor ... is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know.

Northrop Frye

#21. Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

#24. The entire Bible, viewed as a "divine comedy," is contained within a U-shaped story of this sort, one in which man, as explained, loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation.

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

#27. For the Bible there is nothing numinous, no holy or divine presence, within nature itself. Nature is a fellow creature of man.

Northrop Frye

#28. 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

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

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

#31. Our country has shown a lack of will to resist its own disintegration .. Canada is practically the only country left in the world which is a pure colony; colonial in psychology as well as in mercantile economics.

Northrop Frye

#32. Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

#34. 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.

Northrop Frye

#35. The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death.

Northrop Frye

#36. 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.

Northrop Frye

#37. Literature encourages 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.

Northrop Frye

#38. In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs.

Northrop Frye

#39. This is an example of why the humanists have always insisted that you don't learn to think wholly from one language: you learn to think better from linguistic conflict, from bouncing one language off another.

Northrop Frye

#40. Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.

Northrop Frye

#41. In this perspective what I like or don't like disappears, because there's nothing left of me as a separate person: as a reader of literature I exist only as a representative of humanity as a whole. We

Northrop Frye

#42. 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.

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

#44. Separatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It's a disastrous movement within politics and economics.

Northrop Frye

#45. The ups and downs of this cosmos may sometimes be acknowledged to be metaphorical ups and downs, but until about Newton's time most people took the "up" of heaven and the "down" of hell to be more or less descriptive.

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

#47. Between religion's this is and poetry's but suppose this is, there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

#49. Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing, but if the writer deliberately aims at truth, he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.

Northrop Frye

#50. Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

#52. 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.

Northrop Frye

#53. We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.

Northrop Frye

#54. Writers don't seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds.

Northrop Frye

#55. 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.

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

#57. 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

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

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

#60. 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.

Northrop Frye

#61. Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.

Northrop Frye

#62. The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite; if you say, I believe in God, you have already suggested the possibility of not believing in him. [p.250]

Northrop Frye

#63. 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.

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

#65. 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

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

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

#68. We find rhetorical situations everywhere in life, and only our imaginations can get us out of them.

Northrop Frye

#69. Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total structure.

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

#71. [Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.

Northrop Frye

#72. Illusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality is best understood as its negation ...

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

#74. 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.

Northrop Frye

#75. 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?

Northrop Frye

#76. 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 conscientious student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

#78. The book is the world's most patient medium.

Northrop Frye

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. Wisdom is the central form which gives meaning and position to all the facts which are acquired by knowledge, the digestion and assimilation of whatever in the material world the man comes in contact with.

Northrop Frye

#83. The first thing that confronts us in studying verbal structures is that they are arranged sequentially, and have to be read or listened to in time.

Northrop Frye

#84. 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.

Northrop Frye

#85. Historically, a Canadian is an American who rejects the Revolution.

Northrop Frye

#86. 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.

Northrop Frye

#87. The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

#90. 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.

Northrop Frye

#91. The genuine artist, Harris is saying, finds reality in a point of identity between subject and object, a point at which the created world and the world that is really there become the same thing. [p.211]

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

#93. 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.

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

#95. 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.

Northrop Frye

#96. 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.

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye

#98. To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like

Northrop Frye

#99. (U)derneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us.

Northrop Frye

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

Northrop Frye