238 Quotes by Northrop Frye

The wise man looks for the invisible line between the is and the is not which is the way through.

Niels Bohr is said to have advised Einstein to stop telling God what to do: the advise would be relevant to a lot of people besides Einstein.

Social concern does have its own case; environmental pollution, the energy crisis, the atom bomb, all show that a purely laissez-faire attitude to the development of science is pernicious.

Criticism is the science of literature: a systematic and progressive comprehension of it.

There is no such thing as inherent or built-in relevance; no subject is relevant in itself, because every field of knowledge is equally the centre of all knowledge.

His moral and social values are where those most sensible people are, and where the heart usually is in the body, a little left of center.

Criticism can talk, and all the arts are dumb.

What is relevant to the student is not what is related to what or where he is at the moment, but to what he may become or where he may arrive as the result of being a student.

Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study; the fact that it consists of words, as we have seen, makes us confuse it with the talking verbal disciplines.