31 Quotes by M. H. Abrams

Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.

I was never a monist - always a diversitarian.

Jews had an outsider's eye on a lot of Western tradition.

We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture.

Secular thinkers have no more been able to work free of the centuries-old Judeo-Christian culture than Christian theologians were able to work free of their inheritance of classical and pagan thought. The process... has not been the deletion and replacement of religious ideas but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation of religious ideas.

The first test any poem must pass is no longer, 'Is it true to nature?' but a criterion looking in a different direction: namely, 'Is it sincere? Is it genuine?'