Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.
Northrop Frye
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Northrop Frye
Age: 78 †
Born: 1912
Born: July 14
Died: 1991
Died: January 23
Cleric
Literary Critic
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Mind
Credible
Believe
Definition
Bother
Definitions
Believed
Adventure
Already
Doesn
More quotes by Northrop Frye
Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
Northrop Frye
To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
Northrop Frye
Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.
Northrop Frye
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
The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.
Northrop Frye
No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies.
Northrop Frye
[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
Northrop Frye
Characters tend to be either for or against the quest. If they assist it, they are idealized as simply gallant or pure if they obstruct it, they are characterized as simply villainous or cowardly. Hence every typical character...tends to have his moral opposite confronting him, like black and white pieces in a chess game.
Northrop Frye
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
The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
Northrop Frye
We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.
Northrop Frye
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
The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
Northrop Frye
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
Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
Northrop Frye
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
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
My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him .
Northrop Frye
The tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It's the world's most patient medium.
Northrop Frye
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.
Northrop Frye
