Northrop Frye Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old Northrop Frye quotes, Northrop Frye sayings, and Northrop Frye proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.'

A teacher who is not a scholar is soon to be going out of touch with his own subject, and a scholar who is not a teacher is soon going to be out of touch with the world. 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. Northrop Frye
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. Northrop Frye
The difference between non-objective and abstract painting may be suggested by the difference between mathematics and music. Northrop Frye
The end of art is an epiphany, perceiving the particular is universal, the grain of sand as the world. Northrop Frye
I use the term epiphany to mean the opposite of sparagmos. Northrop Frye
The child beginning geometry is presented with a dot and it is told, first, that that is a pointer, and second, that it is not a point. He cannot advance until he accepts both statements at once. Northrop Frye
The conception pi does not mean anything except another mathematical formulation of it. In ordinary experience the shortest distance between two points may not be a straight line, as the shortest way to get to the other side of a wall is around by the door, but geometry knows nothing of such existential untidiness. Northrop Frye
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. Northrop Frye
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. Northrop Frye
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. Northrop Frye
Literature, we said, is conscious mythology; it creates an autonomous world that gives us an imaginative perspective on the actual one. Northrop Frye
Literature is at the center of those because literature is the great laboratory of myths, that is, the statement of reality in terms of man's hopes and desires and fears. Northrop Frye
Literature is an art of words, and the student of it may be interested primarily either in the art or in the words. Northrop Frye
Literature is the total body of stories and symbols that provides hypotheses or models of human behavior and experience. Northrop Frye
Literature is founded on the metaphor that arrests logic and the myth that arrests history; its works are objects of contemplation. Northrop Frye
I say that I was impressed, because, at the age of seventeen, I was not easy to impress. I knew the answers to a great many more questions than I know now. Northrop Frye
The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied to mythology. Northrop Frye
Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature. Northrop Frye
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
When all the intelligence, morality, reverence, and simian cunning of man confronts a sphinx-like riddle of the indefinite like the Canadian winter, the man seems as helpless as a trapped mink and as lonely as a loon. Northrop Frye
I think the only government of which the human race is capable is more or less efficient or corrupt bureaucracy. The degrees of efficiency and corruption are what make the difference. Northrop Frye