44 quotes
Compared to Homeric or even to medieval times, modern man inhabits the physical world like a rapacious stranger.
Marxism and the Literary Critic (1967)
Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.
The Death of Tragedy (1961)
Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity do not easily resume life.
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
For many human beings, religion has been the music which they believe in.
Real Presences (1989)
The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.
Real Presences (1989)
When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.
The Death of Tragedy (1961)
What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?
Real Presences (1989)
Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything.
Real Presences (1989)
Increasingly unable to create for itself a relevant body of myth, the modern imagination will ransack the treasure house of the classic.
The Death of Tragedy (1961)
A sentence always means more. Even a single word, within the weave of incommensurable connotation, can, and usually does.
Real Presences (1989)
There are three intellectual pursuits, and, so far as I am aware, only three, in which human beings have performed major feats before the age of puberty. They are music, mathematics, and chess.
Extraterritorial (1971)
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)
A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)
Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs — but a tribute nevertheless.
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
The Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.
The Death of Tragedy (1961)
Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.
The Death of Tragedy (1961)
Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.
Real Presences (1989)
There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.