238 Quotes by Northrop Frye

Every scholar develops something analogous to a sense of smell, and if a book has declared itself intellectually bankrupt on page 2 the experienced scholar, left to himself will not read on to page 302.

Certainly, the influence of my teachers on me was not directly through anything they taught me, but the impression they gave that the life of a scholar was worth living.

What's produced the aeroplane is not so much a desire to fly as a rebellion against the tyranny of time and space. And that's a process that can never stop, no matter how high our Titovs and Glenns may go.

In an immature society culture is an import; for a mature one it is a native manufacture which eventually becomes an export.

The difference between non-objective and abstract painting may be suggested by the difference between mathematics and music.

You are physically and socially mature. You are, of course, intellectually immature. So are we, on the staff; so is everybody. In the intellectual world the only mature people are those who are willing to admit their immaturity.

The end of art is an epiphany, perceiving the particular is universal, the grain of sand as the world.

Culture is born in leisure and an awareness of standards, and pioneer conditions tend to make energetic and uncritical work an end it itself, to preach a gospel of social unconsciousness, which lingers long after the pioneer conditions have disappeared.

The "yoga" intuition is founded on the notion of transforming the body, & I don't know if there's any Christian alternative answer to it. Our present body is almost wholly unknown to the consciousness which inhabits it. Yoga creates an imaginative body in its place, & goes to work on that.