Northrop Frye Quotes

• Even the human heart is slightly left of centre.

  Northrop Frye

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  The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.

  Northrop Frye

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• The knowledge that you can have is inexhaustible, and what is inexhaustible is benevolent. The knowledge that you cannot have is of the riddles of birth and death, of our future destiny and the purposes of God. Here there is no knowledge, but illusions that restrict freedom and limit hope. Accept the mystery behind knowledge: It is not darkness but shadow.

  Northrop Frye

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• Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.

  Northrop Frye

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• Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writer enters into a structure of traditional stories and images.

  Northrop Frye

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• 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 judgment of mankind.

  Northrop Frye

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• Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I know no other country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.

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  Tags in Canadians, Accountant, Canada

• Culture’s essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.

  Northrop Frye

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  Tags in Idolatry, Replace

• The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.

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• The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.

  Northrop Frye

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  Tags in Pursuit, Nonsense

• In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.

  Northrop Frye

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• It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.

  Northrop Frye

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• Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.

  Northrop Frye

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• 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.

  Northrop Frye

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• Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.

  Northrop Frye

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• Advertising – a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

  Northrop Frye

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Northrop Frye (16)

Birth:	14th July, 1912
Death:	23rd January, 1991
Nationality:	Canadian
Profession:	Critic, Philosopher, Theorist

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