Quote

The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite if you say, I believe in God, you have already suggested the possibility of not believing in him. [p.250]

Northrop Frye

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Northrop Frye
Age: 78 †
Born: 1912
Born: July 14
Died: 1991
Died: January 23
Cleric
Literary Critic
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Bible
Possibility
Thesis
Interested
Stated
Already
Suggested
Belief
Believing
State
Arguing
States
Opposite
Believe
Opposites

More quotes by Northrop Frye

Image
We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.
Northrop Frye
Image
The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
Northrop Frye
Image
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
Northrop Frye
Image
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
Image
Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
Northrop Frye
Image
The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.
Northrop Frye
Image
Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.
Northrop Frye
Image
A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.
Northrop Frye
Image
Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.
Northrop Frye
Image
It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question Who am I? than by some such riddle as Where is here?
Northrop Frye
Image
Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.
Northrop Frye
Image
Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.
Northrop Frye
Image
The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring.
Northrop Frye
Image
Americans like to make money Canadians like to audit it. I don't know of any other country where the accountant enjoys a higher social and moral status.
Northrop Frye
Image
One of the most obvious uses of literature, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance... Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them also as possibilities.
Northrop Frye
Image
In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs.
Northrop Frye
Image
Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
Northrop Frye
Image
Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
Northrop Frye
Image
We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.
Northrop Frye
Image
Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.
Northrop Frye