100 quotes
Metaphor is the language of immanence; metonymy of transcendence. (11C.21)
Literally, the Bible is a gigantic myth, a narrative extending over the whole of time from creation to apocalypse, unified by a body of recurring imagery that "freezes" into a single metaphor cluster, the metaphors all being identified with the body of the Messiah, the man who is all men, the totality logoi who is one Logos, the grain of sand that is the world.
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
One of the major activities of art consists in sharpening the edge of platitudes to make them enter the soul as realities. (p. 7)
Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003)
One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind. (1:313)
I don`t want the reduction of religion to aesthetics, but the abolition of aesthetics & incorporating of art with the Word of God. (p. 7)
Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003)
Under the stimulation of a "great age" or certain period of clarity in art a wider diffusion of genius becomes actual suggests to me that it is always potential. (p. 8)
Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003)
A 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. (p. 70)
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
In imaginative thought there is no real knowledge of anything but similarities (ultimately identities): knowledge of differences is merely a transition to a new knowledge of similarities. (p. 215)
Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003)
Give me a place to stand, and I will include the world. (19.333)
Education is a set of analogies to a genuinely human existence, of which the arts are the model. Merely human life is of course a demonic analogy or parody of genuinely human life. (p. 149)
Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003)
Even the biggest book is fragmentary: to finish anything, you have to cut your losses. Nobody ever writes his dream book. (33.54)
Belief has nothing to do with knowledge, & credo ut intelligam [I believe in order that I might understand] is horseshit. (p. 209)
Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003)
The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology. (21.101)
A community`s art is its spiritual vision. (p. 206)
Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003)
The worst thing we can say about God is that he knows all. The best thing we can say of him is that, on the whole, he tends to keep his knowledge to himself. (2:568)
There is a curious law of art...that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination.
Culture'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.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
One should have bigger & better conversions everyday, like a mechanized phoenix. (21.495)
My greater simplicity came from a deeper level than the labyrinth of the brain. (1:61-2)
Yesterday's kook book becomes tomorrow's standard text. (2:495)