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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

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Northrop Frye
Age: 78 †
Born: 1912
Born: July 14
Died: 1991
Died: January 23
Cleric
Literary Critic
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Belief
Possibilities
Use
Tolerance
Action
Beliefs
Preoccupied
Art
Arts
Bigots
Also
Actions
Fanatics
Think
Obvious
Uses
Possibility
Seldom
Literature
Encouragement

More quotes by Northrop Frye

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There is a curious law of art... that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination.
Northrop Frye
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Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.
Northrop Frye
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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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My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him .
Northrop Frye
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One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.
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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Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
Northrop Frye
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A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
Northrop Frye
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Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
Northrop Frye
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This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
Northrop Frye
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We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.
Northrop Frye
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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
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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
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Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
Northrop Frye
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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
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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
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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
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[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
Northrop Frye
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We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.
Northrop Frye
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Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
Northrop Frye