Top 90 Northrop Frye Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.”

— Northrop Frye

52. “Historically, a Canadian is an American who rejects the Revolution.”

— Northrop Frye

53. “The written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it recreates the past in the present, and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination.”

— Northrop Frye

54. “The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.”

— Northrop Frye

55. “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.”

— Northrop Frye

56. “In the world of the imagination, anything goes that’s imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.”

— Northrop Frye

57. “The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring.”

— Northrop Frye

58. “We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It’s just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.”

— Northrop Frye

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

— Northrop Frye

60. “The bedrock of doubt is the total nothingness of death. Death is a leveler, not because everybody dies, but because nobody understands what death means.”

— Northrop Frye

61. “The operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power, formulas that become a focus of mental activity.”

— Northrop Frye

62. “The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.”

— Northrop Frye

63. “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

64. “The book is the world’s most patient medium.”

— Northrop Frye

65. “Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.”

— Northrop Frye

66. “Mythological thinking cannot be superseded, because it forms the framework and context for all thinking.”

— Northrop Frye

67. “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

68. “The ups and downs of this cosmos may sometimes be acknowledged to be metaphorical ups and downs, but until about Newton’s time most people took the “up” of heaven and the “down” of hell to be more or less descriptive.”

— Northrop Frye

69. “Real unity tolerates dissent and rejoices in variety of outlook and tradition, recognizes that it is man’s destiny to unite and not divide, and understands that creating proletariats and scapegoats and second-class citizens is a mean and contemptible activity.”

— Northrop Frye

70. “A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.”

— Northrop Frye

71. “A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art’s sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.”

— Northrop Frye

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

— Northrop Frye

73. “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

74. “It is impossible to think of an ideal human life except as an alternation of individual and social life, as equally a belonging and an escape.”

— Northrop Frye

75. “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.”

— Northrop Frye

76. “We do not live in centred space anymore, but have to create our own centres.”

— Northrop Frye

77. “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

78. “It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and were we have to surrender precision for flexibility.”

— Northrop Frye

79. “The first thing that confronts us in studying verbal structures is that they are arranged sequentially, and have to be read or listened to in time.”

— Northrop Frye

80. “The upper class made their names for the lower classes – villain, knave, varlet, boor – into terms of contempt because the people they described had to wriggle through life as best they could: their first and almost their only rule was survival. The deadliest insult one gentleman could give another then was to call him a liar, not because the one being insulted had a passion for truth, but because it was being suggested that he couldn’t afford to tell the truth.”

— Northrop Frye

81. “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.”

— Northrop Frye

82. “Writers don’t seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds.”

— Northrop Frye

83. “Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total structure.”

— Northrop Frye

84. “We are always in the place of beginning; there is no advance in infinity.”

— Northrop Frye

85. “The purest human act, and a model for all human acts, is an informative, creative act which transforms a world that is merely objective, set against us, in which we feel lonely and frightened and unwanted, into a home.”

— Northrop Frye

86. “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

87. “We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.”

— Northrop Frye

88. “Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.”

— Northrop Frye

89. “The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death.”

— Northrop Frye

90. “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.”

— Northrop Frye

91. “Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.”

— Northrop Frye

92. “A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory.”

— Northrop Frye

93. “Honest critics are continually finding blind spots in their taste: they discover the possibility of recognizing a valid form of poetic experience without being able to realize it for themselves.”

— Northrop Frye

94. “If Shakespeare were alive now, no doubt he’d be interviewed every week and his opinions canvassed on every subject from national foreign policy to the social effects of punk rock. But in his day nobody cared what Shakespeare’s views were about anything, and he wouldn’t have been allowed to discuss public affairs publicly. He wasn’t, therefore, under a constant pressure to become opinionated.”

— Northrop Frye

95. “People don’t get into planes because they want to fly, they get into planes because they want to get somewhere else faster. What’s produced the aeroplane is not so much a desire to fly as a rebellion against the tyranny of time and space.”

— Northrop Frye

96. “Literature’s world is a concrete human world of immediate experience. The poet uses images and objects and sensations much more than he uses abstract ideas; the novelist is concerned with telling stories, not with working out arguments.”

— Northrop Frye

97. “Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the languages of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music.”

— Northrop Frye