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Northrop Frye: 274 quotes3 likes

“Genius is a power of the soul and that powers of the soul can be developed by everyone.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 8

“Just as a new scientific discovery manifests sometimes 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

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype

“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

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter Two, p. 31

“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

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 4: The Keys To Dreamland

“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

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School

“The mark of a great writer: who sees his own time, but with a detachment that makes him communicable to other ages.”

Northrop Frye

2:579
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

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

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter Six, p. 168

“Jargon or gobbledygook, or what people who live in Washington or Ottawa call "federal prose," [is] the gabble of abstractions and vague words which avoids any simple or direct statement…. Direct and simple language always has some force behind it, and the writers of gobbledygook don't want to be forceful; they want to be soothing and reassuring.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence

“The worst thing we can say about God is that he knows all. The best thing we can say of him is that, on the whole, he tends to keep his knowledge to himself.”

Northrop Frye

2:568
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

“The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter 8, p. 200

“The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life…is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence

“I give the impression of elusiveness sometimes, and rightly, because I really do have an inner chamber in my temple I'm not mature enough to open.”

Northrop Frye

2:618
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

“Finnegans Wake is a kind of hypnagogic structure, words reverberating on themselves without pointing to objects…This may be the hallucinatory verbal world within which God speaks.”

Northrop Frye

1:399
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

“A purely individualized myth is an obsession, sometimes a psychosis. A purely socialized myth is an ideology, which sooner or later also becomes obsessive or psychotic. A myth that has either the direct current of transcendence or the alternating current of imagination rises clear of this grisly antithesis.”

Northrop Frye

2:716
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

“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

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype

“We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter Six, p. 158

“Yesterday's kook book becomes tomorrow's standard text.”

Northrop Frye

2:495
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

“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

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Anagogic Phase: Symbol as Monad

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

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter Five, p. 136

“Experience is nearly always commonplace; the present is not romantic in the way the past is, and ideals and great visions have a way of becoming shoddy and squalid in practical life. Literature reverses this process.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time