For the Bible there is nothing numinous, no holy or divine presence, within nature itself. Nature is a fellow creature of man.

The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it’s opposite; if you say, I believe in God, you have already suggested the possibility of...

What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life. Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but...

I don’t see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society. [p.92]

Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I know no other country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.

We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still...

A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don’t mind being that.

It doesn’t matter whether a sequence of words is called a history or a story: that is, whether it is intended to follow a sequence of actual events or not. As far as its verbal...

So, you may ask, what is the use of studying the world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally...

The genuine artist, Harris is saying, finds reality in a point of identity between subject and object, a point at which the created world and the world that is really there become the same thing....

Literature keeps presenting the most vicious things to us an entertainment, but what it appeals to is not any pleasure of these things, but the exhilaration of standing apart from them and being able to...

A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.

Wisdom is the central form which gives meaning and position to all the facts which are acquired by knowledge, the digestion and assimilation of whatever in the material world the man comes in contact with.

The books of a serious writer are like the tip of an iceberg, the little that has emerged from a sunken mountain of torn-up drafts. Northrop FryeA body of words cannot be literally anything but...

The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him,...

Authority is essential to society, but what we called in King Lear “transcendental” authority, with an executive ruler on top, depends on the ruler’s understanding of equity. If he hasn’t enough of such understanding, authority...

Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at. [p.93]

The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely...

The particular myth that’s been organizing this talk, and in a way the whole series, is the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible. The civilization we live in at present is a...