Northrop Frye Men Quotations

Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.

I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society. [p.92]

The twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent, better trained, had more languages, had a better sense of proportion, and were infinitely more accurate scholars and competent professional men than I. I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.

Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.

The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment.

The entire Bible, viewed as a "divine comedy," is contained within a U-shaped story of this sort, one in which man, as explained, loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation.

The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for "literalists," becomes much simpler when we read it typologically , as a mosiac of allusions to Old Testament prophecy.

Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.

Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.

Separatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It's a disastrous movement within politics and economics.

War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.

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.

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.

Everything that happens in the Old Testament is a "type" or adumbration of something that happens in the New Testament, and the whole subject is therefore called typology, though it is a typology in a special sense.

Literally, the Bible is a gigantic myth, a narrative extending over the whole of time from creation to apocalypse, unified by a body of recurring imagery that "freezes" into a single metaphor cluster, the metaphors all being identified with the body of the Messiah, the man who is all men, the totality logoi who is one Logos, the grain of sand that is the world.

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.