"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.
                                    
“We are surrounded by poetry on all sides…”
Source: The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
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Vincent Van Gogh 238
Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890) 1853–1890Related quotes
“Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.”
                                        
                                        Quote in his letter tot Theo, from The Hague, Sunday, 18 March 1883; as cited in The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Vol. 2 (1958) New York Graphic Society, p. 12 
1880s, 1883
                                    
                                        
                                        Lectures on Education delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, London, 1855, published in "What Knowledge is of Most Worth", The Westminster Review (July 1859) volume CXLI, p. 1-23, at  p. 19 http://books.google.com/books?id=5NQ6AQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA19 
Context: The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion. … Think you that a drop of water, which to the vulgar eye is but a drop of water, loses any thing in the eye of the physicist who knows that its elements are held together by a force which, if suddenly liberated, would produce a flash of lightning? Think you that what is carelessly looked upon by the uninitiated as a mere snow-flake does not suggest higher associations to one who has seen through a microscope the wondrously varied and elegant forms of snow-crystals? Think you that the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches calls up as much poetry in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, who knows that over this rock a glacier slid a million years ago? The truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.
                                    
                                        
                                        2002-11-28 
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/28/technology/circuits/28garg.html?src=pm&pagewanted=all 
A Word of the Day Keeps Banality at Bay 
The New York Times 
Katie Hafner