Northrop Frye - Collected Quotes

"Imagination creates reality, and as desire is a part of imagination, the world we desire is more real than the world we passively accept." (Northrop Frye, "Fearful Symmetry", 1947)

"Just as a new scientific discovery manifests sometimes that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words." (Northrop Frye, "Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays", 1957)

"Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism." (Northrop Frye, "Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays", 1957)

"Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music." (Northrop Frye, "The Educated Imagination", 1963)

"Art is not simply an identity of illusion and reality, but a counter-illusion: its world is a material world, but the material of an intelligible spiritual world."  (Northrop Frye)

"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."  (Northrop Frye)

"We are always in the place of beginning; there is no advance in infinity."  (Northrop Frye)