238 Quotes by Northrop Frye

Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.

Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing, but if the writer deliberately aims at truth, he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.

Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.

Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.

The Bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along can settle on it.

The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.

The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.

The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.

There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.