Famous quotes by »

Northrop Frye

Herman Northrop Frye, CC FRSC was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.

Update this biography »
Complete biography of Northrop Frye »

0 fans

Sort by:PopularityA - Z

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.

– Northrop Frye

Rate it:

Between religion's this is and poetry's but suppose this is, there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.

– Northrop Frye

Rate it:

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

Rate it:

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.

– Northrop Frye

Rate it:

It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.

– Northrop Frye

Rate it:

It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.

– Northrop Frye

Rate it:

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.

– Northrop Frye

Rate it:

Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of quaint, and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive.

– Northrop Frye

Rate it:

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

Rate it:

The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.

– Northrop Frye

Rate it:

Share your thoughts on Northrop Frye's quotes with the community:

0 Comments

Notify me of new comments via email.

Quote of the Day Today's Quote | Archive

Would you like us to send you a FREE inspiring quote delivered to your inbox daily?

Citation

Use the citation below to add this author page to your bibliography:

Style:MLAChicagoAPA

"Northrop Frye Quotes." Quotes.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 17 May 2024. <https://www.quotes.net/authors/Northrop+Frye+Quotes>.

Missing a quote of Northrop Frye?

Know another good quote of Northrop Frye? Don't keep it to yourself!

The Web's Largest Resource for

Famous Quotes & Sayings

A Member Of The STANDS4 Network

Our favorite collection of

Famous Authors

Hippocrates
460 BC - 370 BC
Confucius
551 BC - 479 BC
Sigmund Freud
1856 - 1939
Winston Churchill
1874 - 1965
Blaise Pascal
1623 - 1662
Marilyn Monroe
1926 - 1962
Galileo Galilei
1564 - 1642

Browse Quotes.net

#A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Quiz

Are you a quotes master?

In which movie does this quote appear: "Here's looking at you, kid."?

A Casablanca

B In the Line of Fire

C Taxi Driver

D Unforgiven