100 quotes
In society's eyes the virtue of saying the right thing at the right time is more important that the virtue of telling the whole truth, or even of telling the truth at all.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
Education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him. It doesn't just train the mind: it's a social and moral development too.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
The entire Bible, viewed as a "divine comedy," is contained within a U-shaped story of this sort, one in which man, as explained, loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.(pg.18)
The Educated Imagination (1963)
What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a "pure" or "exact" science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
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.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
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.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.
In 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.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
The real Bible is a sealed book, an apocryphon, a book not to be opened (mentally) until its time has come. (2:568)
We are always in the place of beginning; there is no advance in infinity. (1:281)
The mark of a great writer: who sees his own time, but with a detachment that makes him communicable to other ages. (2:579)
Finnegans Wake is not a book to read, but a book to decipher: as Joyce says, it's about a dreamer, but it's addressed to an ideal reader suffering from ideal insomnia.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
Genius is a power of the soul and that powers of the soul can be developed by everyone. (p. 8)
Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003)
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.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
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.
If you haven't got an excremental vision you have no business setting up as a major satirist. (2:578-9)
The total simultaneous pattern always extend from alpha to omega. (21.190)
In literature you don't just read one poem or novel after another, but enter into a complete world of which every work of literature forms part. This affects the writer as much as it does the reader.
The Educated Imagination (1963)