100 quotes
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.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
But in the imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the imagination is a totally human world.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
At the level of ordinary consciousness the individual man is the centre of everything, surrounded on all sides by what he isn't.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.
It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and where we have to surrender precision for flexibility.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
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.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
Literature does not reflect life, but it doesn't escape or withdraw from life either: it swallows it.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
The only way to forestall the work of criticism is through censorship, which has the same relation to criticism that lynching has to justice.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
One person by himself is not a complete human being.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
For all its wonderful machinery, we know it's really a crazy ramshackle building, and at any time may crash around our ears.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
The poet...is an identifier: everything he sees in nature he identifies with human life.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
Writers don't seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
There can be no free speech in a mob: free speech is one thing a mob can't stand.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
It is of the essence of imaginative culture that is transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
Poets are happier as servants of religion than of politics.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
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.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
The written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it re-creates the past in the present, and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)