Famous Quotes & Sayings

Mason Cooley

First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.

Nancy Pearcey

Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.

Terry Eagleton

Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.

Terry Eagleton

What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism .

Terry Eagleton

It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.

Terry Eagleton

You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.

Terry Eagleton

If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.

Karen Armstrong

He [Aristotle] pointed out that people who had become initiates in the various mystery religions were not required to learn any facts 'but to experience certain emotions and to be put in a certain disposition.' Hence his famous literary theory that tragedy effected a purification (katharsis) of the emotions of terror and pity that amounted to an experience of rebirth.

Charles Caleb Colton

It is astonishing how much more anxious people are to lengthen life than to improve it; and as misers often lose large sums of money in attempting to make more, so do hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.

Charles Dickens

Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.

Charles Dickens

I have heard it said that as we keep our birthdays when we are alive, so the ghosts of dead people, who are not easy in their graves, keep the day they died upon.

Charles Dickens

Some people are nobody's enemies but their own

Charles Studd

Had I cared for the comments of people, I should never have been a missionary.

Charles Stross

In general, a little controversy isn't harmful: if anything, it gets people interested.

Charles Stanley

I certainly respect other people's opinions, but I would not vote for a woman to be the pastor of a church.

Charles Spurgeon

The Lord's people have always been a waiting people.

Charles Spurgeon

People will not receive the balm of the gospel unless they know something of the wounds that sin has made.

Edith Wharton

There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.

David Hockney

Tragedy is a literary concept.

Antonin Artaud

Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.

William Shakespeare

I despised my arrival on this earth and I despise my departure; it is a tragedy.

Charlie Munger

Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is not a tragedy.

Carl Jung

The utter failure came at the Crucifixion in the tragic words, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' If you want to understand the full tragedy of those words you must realize what they meant: Christ saw that his whole life, devoted to the truth according to his best conviction, had been a terrible illusion. He had lived it to the full absolutely sincerely, he had made his honest experiment, but it was nevertheless a compensation. On the cross his mission deserted him. But because he had lived so fully and devotedly he won through to the Resurrection body.

Barbara Tuchman

The fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten.

Charlton Heston

Society mends its wounds. And that's invariably true in all the tragedies, in the comedies as well. And certainly in the histories.

Ai Weiwei

A nation that has no music and no fairytales is a tragedy.