238 Quotes by Northrop Frye

Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of.

A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don’t mind being that.

The ups and downs of this cosmos may sometimes be acknowledged to be metaphorical ups and downs, but until about Newton’s time most people took the “up” of heaven and the “down” of hell to be more or less descriptive.

Real unity tolerates dissent and rejoices in variety of outlook and tradition, recognizes that it is man’s destiny to unite and not divide, and understands that creating proletariats and scapegoats and second-class citizens is a mean and contemptible activity.

Literature is a human apocalypse, man’s revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.

A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art’s sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.

Mythological thinking cannot be superseded, because it forms the framework and context for all thinking.

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

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.