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 FryeReal 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 FryeOne doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.
Northrop FryeThe 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 FryeA 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 FryeCharacters tend to be either for or against the quest. If they assist it, they are idealized as simply gallant or pure; if they obstruct it, they are characterized as simply villainous or cowardly. Hence every typical character...tends to have his moral opposite confronting him, like black and white pieces in a chess game.
Northrop FryeThe poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.
Northrop FryeA 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 FryeEvery human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.
Northrop FryeA 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 FryeWe 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 FryeTo bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
Northrop FryeWork, as we usually think of it, is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy expended for its own sake, as with children's play, or as manifestation of the end or goal of work, as in "playing" chess or the piano. Play in this sense, then, is the fulfillment of work, the exhibition of what the work has been done for.
Northrop FryeNobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at.
Northrop FryeNo 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 FryeThose 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 FryeSeparatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It's a disastrous movement within politics and economics.
Northrop FryeThe 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 FryeThe world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.
Northrop FryeCulture'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 FryeMyths, as compared with folk tales, are usually in a special category of seriousness: they are believed to have "really happened,"or to have some exceptional significance in explaining certain features of life, such as ritual. Again, whereas folk tales simply interchange motifs and develop variants, myths show an odd tendency to stick together and build up bigger structures. We have creation myths, fall and flood myths, metamorphose and dying-god myths.
Northrop FryeThe tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It's the world's most patient medium.
Northrop FryeAmericans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I don't know of any other country where the accountant enjoys a higher social and moral status.
Northrop FryeOne of the most obvious uses of literature, I think, is its encouragement of 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 FryeA person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
Northrop FryeIn 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 FryeIt seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question "Who am I?" than by some such riddle as "Where is here?
Northrop FryeBetween 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 FryeWe must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.
Northrop FryeThe Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite; if you say, I believe in God, you have already suggested the possibility of not believing in him. [p.250]
Northrop FryeOur country has shown a lack of will to resist its own disintegration .. . Canada is practically the only country left in the world which is a pure colony; colonial in psychology as well as in mercantile economics.
Northrop FryeIt is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.
Northrop FryeI 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.
Northrop FryeLiterature 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 FryeThe 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 FryeThe 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 FryeLiterature 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