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The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.

Terry Eagleton

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Terry Eagleton
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: February 22
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Literary Theorist
Non-Fiction Writer
Researcher
University Teacher
Writer
Salford
Greater Manchester
Past
Used
Renew
Bury
Present

More quotes by Terry Eagleton

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Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
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Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
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The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.
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Nothing in human life is inherently private.
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Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
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Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.
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To claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it.
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It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
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Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
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Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant.
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It is silly to call fat people gravitationally challenged, a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.
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In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.
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Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.
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It is easy to see why a diversity of cultures should confront power with a problem. If culture is about plurality, power is about unity. How can it sell itself simultaneously to a whole range of life forms without being fatally diluted?
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Americans use the word dream as often as psychoanalysts do.
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It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
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The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.
Terry Eagleton
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We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and arational.
Terry Eagleton
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Christian faith, as I understand it, is not primarily a matter of signing on for the proposition that there exists a Supreme Being, but the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love.
Terry Eagleton
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The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
Terry Eagleton