100 quotes
Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
Fables of Identity (1963)
The operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power, formulas that become a focus of mental activity.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
The objective world is the order of nature, thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense experience, and words are the servomechanisms of reflection.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
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.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling "life is a dream" becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
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.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.
Words with Power : Being a Second Study of The Bible and Literature (1990)
Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.
Posterity is the laziest and most incompetent of critics.
Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
I wrote Fearful Symmetry during the Second World War, and hideous as the time was, it provided some parallels with Blake's time which were useful for understanding Blake's attitude to the world.
Fearful Symmetry : A Study of William Blake (1947)
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.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)