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Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.

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
Form
Forms
Matter
Brought
Much
Learning
Way
Particular
Thinking
Ways
Feeling
Culture
Feelings
Appropriate

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Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
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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.
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Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.
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The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.
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From the viewpoint of political power, culture is absolutely vital. So vital, indeed, that power cannot operate without it. It is culture, in the sense of the everyday habits and beliefs of a people, which beds power down, makes it appear natural and inevitable, turns it into spontaneous reflex and response.
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In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are and this means insisting on their vital role in the whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like some poor relation, they don't cost much to be housed.
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History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
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Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
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God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
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The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.
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Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
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Nothing in human life is inherently private.
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The political currents that topped the global agenda in the late 20th century - revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle - place culture at their heart.
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Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable.
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All communication involves faith indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.
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Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.
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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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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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Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
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It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.
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