Northrop Frye: Human

Northrop Frye was Canadian literary critic and literary theorist. Explore interesting quotes on human.
Northrop Frye: 274   quotes 3   likes

“As civilization develops, we become more preoccupied with human life, and less conscious of our relation to non-human nature. Literature reflects this, and the more advanced the civilization, the more literature seems to concern itself with purely human problems and conflicts. The gods and heroes of the old myths fade away and give place to people like ourselves.”

Northrop Frye

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

Life , God , People , Literature

“We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath 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

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School
Context: [L]iterature not only leads us toward the regaining of identity, but it also separates this state from its opposite, the world we don't like and want to get away from... We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath 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.... Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.

Life , Nature , Problem

“But in the imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the imagination is a totally human world.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html
Context: At the level of ordinary consciousness the individual man is the centre of everything, surrounded on all sides by what he isn't. At the level of practical sense, or civilization, there's a human circumference, a little cultivated world with a human shape, fenced off from the jungle and inside the sea and the sky. But in the imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the imagination is a totally human world.

World , Imagination

“The poet…is an identifier: everything he sees in nature he identifies with human life.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time
Context: The poet... is an identifier: everything he sees in nature he identifies with human life.

Life , Nature

“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

Source: The Educated Imagination

Imagination , Cats , Literature , Hell

“The world of literature is human in shape”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html
Context: The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment. Literature's world is a concrete human world of immediate experience... The world of literature is human in shape, a world where the sun rises in the east and sets in the west over the edge of a flat earth in three dimensions, where the primary realities are not atoms or electrons but bodies, and the primary forces not energy or gravitation but love and death and passion and joy.

World , Literature

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

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter One, p. 7

“The human mind is [a poet's] individual mind at first, but as soon as he writes a poem it becomes our [the readers'] minds too. There is no self-expression in [a poet's] poem, because once the poem is there the individual [poet] has disappeared. …there is really no such thing as self-expression in literature.”

Northrop Frye

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

Literature

“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.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 149

Life , Education , Art

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

Northrop Frye

Words with Power : Being a Second Study of The Bible and Literature (1990), Introduction, p. xiii http://books.google.com/books?id=ZnSJb6PPnBoC&pg=PP81&lpg=PP81&dq=%22which+is+inherited,+transmitted+and+diversified+by+literature%22&source=bl&ots=xJ1cLDaUCI&sig=m6agYWMBlW0qfDYMA7aX9aNM8IE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=PaCqUsiEM-issQT_4oGAAg&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=%22which%20is%20inherited%2C%20transmitted%20and%20diversified%20by%20literature%22&f=false
"Quotes"

Literature

“One person by himself is not a complete human being.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html

Personality

“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

Life , Art , Imagination , Literature

“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

Life , Religion , Literature

“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

“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

"Canadian Energy: Dialogues on Creativity: Northrop Frye." Descant 12, no. 32-3 (1981).
"Quotes", Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008)

Thinking , Personality

“There's something in all of us that wants to drift toward a mob, where we can all say the same thing without having to think about it, because everybody is all alike except people that we can hate or persecute. Every time we use words, we're either righting against this tendency or giving in to it. When we fight against it, we're taking the side of genuine and permanent human civilization.”

Northrop Frye

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

Hate , People , Thinking , Time

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

Northrop Frye

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

World , Imagination , Reality , Literature