“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

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Experience is nearly always commonplace; the present is not romantic in the way the past is, and ideals and great visio…" by Northrop Frye?

Northrop Frye photo

Northrop Frye137

Canadian literary critic and literary theorist 1912–1991

Related quotes

“Beethoven is the first composer to represent the complex process of memory-not merely the sense of loss and regret that accompanies visions of the past, but the physical experience of calling up the past within the present.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 3 : Mountains and Song Cycles

“Vision is the beginning point of any great endeavor. Vision is a picture of how we would like tomorrow to look—or, put another way, how we would like ourselves to look tomorrow. Every good leadership book identifies vision as an essential characteristic of a leader, and every good leader has learned his or her responsibility to create and communicate a vision. But the danger is that talk of a vision has become so prevalent—maybe even so commonplace—that many leaders take the process and discipline out of vision-casting for granted.”

Don Soderquist (1934–2016)

Don Soderquist “ The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World's Largest Company https://books.google.com/books?id=mIxwVLXdyjQC&lpg=PR9&dq=Don%20Soderquist&pg=PR9#v=onepage&q=Don%20Soderquist&f=false, Thomas Nelson, April 2005, p. 11. <br class="br">On Having a Personal Mission and Vision

“Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

“The advent of small, inexpensive computers with superb graphics has changed the way many sciences are practiced, and the way that all sciences present the results of experiments and calculations.”

John D. Barrow (1952–2020) British scientist

Introduction
Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science (2008)

“Epic literature is not history but is again a way of looking at the past.”

Romila Thapar (1931) Indian historian

Source: Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, p. 100.

“In daily practical experience, try to concentrate for a while upon seemingly subordinate abilities, ones that you think of as latent. If you do so consistently, using your imagination and will, then those abilities will become prominent in your present. The current beliefs will reprogram and alter past experience. It is not simply that past, forgotten, unconsciously perceived events will be put together in a new way and organized under a new heading, but in that past (now not perceivable), the entire bodily response to seemingly past events will change.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Nature of Personal Reality (1974), p. 359

“Simple-minded beyond the experience of Wall Street or State Street, he resorted, like most men of the same intellectual calibre, to commonplaces when at a loss for expression: "Let us have peace!" or, "The best way to treat a bad law is to execute it"; or a score of such reversible sentences generally to be gauged by their sententiousness.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“It would be a great abuse of my position to write that it was Northwest Airlines that treated us in this shoddy and inexcusable way, so I won't.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

I'm a Stranger Here Myself (US), Notes From a Big Country (UK) (1998)

“There is a deep irony in the fact that the more nearly an ideal is brought to realization, the more acutely do the saints and heroes who have committed themselves to the task, experience a vehement sense of failure in not having perfected their ideal in its totality; and inversely, the more perfunctory is the pursuit of an ideal, the less are people troubled by discrepancies between practice and principle.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

Discrepancies among the Social Sciences (1981)

“I do not compare the past with the present without a prejudice for either, but, great as the improvement in country life is in many respects, it seems a pity the old cheap, wholesome dishes have gone to make way for tinned and preserved foods.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

August Chapter The Peverel Papers - A yearbook of the countryside ed Julian Shuckburgh Century Hutchinson 1986
The Peverel Papers

Related topics