Top 90 Northrop Frye Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.”

— Northrop Frye

2. “The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.”

— Northrop Frye

3. “This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.”

— Northrop Frye

4. “The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.”

— Northrop Frye

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

— Northrop Frye

6. “Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.”

— Northrop Frye

7. “My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him .”

— Northrop Frye

8. “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.”

— Northrop Frye

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

— Northrop Frye

10. “Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.”

— Northrop Frye

11. “Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic.”

— Northrop Frye

12. “Even the human heart is slightly left of centre.”

— Northrop Frye

13. “Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it’s as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.”

— Northrop Frye

14. “A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don’t mind being that.”

— Northrop Frye

15. “Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell.”

— Northrop Frye

16. “Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.”

— Northrop Frye

17. “Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading.”

— Northrop Frye

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18. “We find rhetorical situations everywhere in life, and only our imaginations can get us out of them.”

— Northrop Frye

19. “Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing, but if the writer deliberately aims at truth, he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.”

— Northrop Frye

20. “There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.”

— Northrop Frye

21. “Read Blake or go to hell, that’s my message to the modern world.”

— Northrop Frye

22. “Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.”

— Northrop Frye

23. “Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.”

— Northrop Frye

24. “No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself.”

— Northrop Frye

25. “Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.”

— Northrop Frye

26. “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

27. “Literature encourages 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

28. “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.”

— Northrop Frye

29. “I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: The most conscientous student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.”

— Northrop Frye

30. “Separatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It’s a disastrous movement within politics and economics.”

— Northrop Frye

31. “What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.”

— Northrop Frye

32. “The Bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along can settle on it.”

— Northrop Frye

33. “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

34. “Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I know no other country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.”

— Northrop Frye

35. “Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.”

— Northrop Frye

36. “To bring anything really to life in literature we can’t be lifelike: we have to be literature-like.”

— Northrop Frye

37. “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

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

— Northrop Frye

39. “The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.”

— Northrop Frye

40. “We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it still with us.”

— Northrop Frye

41. “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

42. “The motive for metaphor... is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know.”

— Northrop Frye

43. “The objective world is the order of nature, thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense experience, and words are the servomechanisms of reflection.”

— Northrop Frye

44. “Advertising – a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.”

— Northrop Frye

45. “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

46. “We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.”

— Northrop Frye

47. “The gods and heroes of the old myths fade away and give place to people like ourselves. In Shakespeare we can still have heroes who can see ghosts and talk in magnificent poetry, but by the time we get to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot they’re speaking prose and have turned into ghosts themselves.”

— Northrop Frye

48. “For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he can exploit; for the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong.”

— Northrop Frye

49. “We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling “life is a dream” becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it.”

— Northrop Frye

50. “One doesn’t bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There’s no adventure of the mind.”

— Northrop Frye