What's produced the aeroplane is not so much a desire to fly as a rebellion against the tyranny of time and space. And that's a process that can never stop, no matter how high our Titovs and Glenns may go. Northrop Frye

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You are physically and socially mature. You are, of course, intellectually immature. So are we, on the staff; so is everybody. In the intellectual world the only mature people are those who are willing to admit their immaturity. Northrop Frye

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The "yoga" intuition is founded on the notion of transforming the body, & I don't know if there's any Christian alternative answer to it. Our present body is almost wholly unknown to the consciousness which inhabits it. Yoga creates an imaginative body in its place, & goes to work on that. Northrop Frye

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Yoga is the voluntary suppression of the involuntary actions of the mind. We're all born with a natural yoga: we're freed by objective energy and our consciousness freezes it into matter. Northrop Frye

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Christianity says you got born but you don't die; Buddhism says you die but you never get born. Northrop Frye

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Air is the invisible medium by which things become visible, hence the spiritual is the power of making things visible, the medium of creative energy. Northrop Frye

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The wise man looks for the invisible line between the is and the is not which is the way through. Northrop Frye

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Criticism is the science of literature: a systematic and progressive comprehension of it. Northrop Frye

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Criticism can talk, and all the arts are dumb. Northrop Frye

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We have criticism simply because the directed experience of literature is never adequate. Northrop Frye

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Criticism and literature are related as a theory to practice, and the function of criticism is to explain the social function and relevance of literature. Northrop Frye

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Criticism, in order to point beyond itself, needs to be actively iconoclastic about itself. Northrop Frye

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Criticism is the primary act of human awareness: it expresses detachment without separation. Northrop Frye

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We celebrate the Resurrection every Easter, but Easter by itself does not suggest resurrection; it suggests only the renewing of the cycle of time, the euphoria with which we greet the end of winter and the coming of summer. Northrop Frye

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Let your approach to knowledge be without fear, for God wills to reveal himself, and his revelation is mysterious only because it is infinite. Northrop Frye

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The social energy which maintains the class structure produces perverted culture in its three chief forms: mere upper-class culture, or ostentation, mere middle-class culture, or vulgarity, and mere lower-class culture, or squalor. Northrop Frye

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I think the real longing is not for a mass movement sweeping up individual concerns, but for an individualized movement reaching out to social concerns. Northrop Frye

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Revolutions are started, though they are seldom finished, by people of conviction. Nothing is more tedious than other people's convictions and the most natural response to tedium is apathy. Northrop Frye

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I would think of education as the only genuine revolution that society is ever likely to accomplish. Northrop Frye

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What is popular in our generation often becomes ridiculous in the next one, quaint in the third, and is finally regarded as primitive in the fourth. Northrop Frye

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In science fiction, it's the world within that's really existing, and the world without is only a projection of it. At least, when the within isn't interesting, the without isn't either. Northrop Frye

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Science fiction may conceivably be a primitive beginning of a new form of heroic epic; Beckett and similar types of literary nihilism the primitive beginnings of a new antithetical pessimism. Northrop Frye

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Science fiction frequently tries to imagine what life would be like on a plane as far above us as we are above savagery; its setting is often of a kind that appears to us as technologically miraculous. It is thus a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth. Northrop Frye

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Tragedy is a paradoxical combination of a fearful sense of rightness and a pitying sense of wrongness. Northrop Frye

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Imagination is not fantasy; what it produces is really and permanently there, and the creative mind is not the subjective or introverted mind. Northrop Frye

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It is in the imagination that the world becomes more intelligible, and communication proceeds without the obstacles of cultural difference. Northrop Frye

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The whole notion of 'productive' is an assembly-line notion that is now being outgrown. A scholar should take a creative interest in his subject, and what will make the 'productive' compulsion less universal will be the rise in adult education. Northrop Frye

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The television set is so much more introverted than even the movie, and the movie in turn, more introverted than the concert hall or the stage Northrop Frye

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Ned Pratt is the only figure in Canadian literature, so far, great enough to establish a personal legend. And the legend was unique because it had the poet behind it. Northrop Frye

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Of course, a scholar who attempts anything but scholarship is rather in the position of a man who has volunteered to amuse a children's party; he is not sure that his really solid virtues will count for much. Northrop Frye

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