Favorite Frye Quotes

THE GREAT CODE: The Bible and Literature

"What a man essentially is is revealed in two ways: by the record of what he has done, and by what he is trying to make of himself at any given moment" (Frye, 49).

"A serious human life, no matter what 'religion' is invoked, can hardly begin until we see an element of illusion in what is really there, and something real in fantasies about what might be there instead. At that point the imaginative and the concerned begin to unite" (Frye, 50).

"Human life is a continuum that we join at birth and drop off at death. But, because we begin and end, we insist that beginnings and endings must be much more deeply built into the reality of things than the universe suggests, and we shape our myths accordingly" (Frye, 108).

"...the central metaphor underlying 'beginning' is not really birth at all. it is rather the moment of waking from sleep, when one world disappears and another comes into being" (Frye, 108).

"What man acquires in the Fall is evidently sexual experience as we know it, and something called the knowledge of good and evil, obviously connected with sex but not otherwise explained" (Frye, 109).

"To create is to create a designed unity, with the craftsman's care in which every detail acquires a function, a distinctive relationship to a whole" (Frye,112).

"...history itself is a period of listening in the dark for guidance through the ear" (Frye, 117).

"Law is general: Wisdom begins in interpreting and commenting on law, and applying it to specific and variable situations" (Frye, 121).

"Wisdom, as noted, is not knowlege: Knowledge is of the particular and actual, and wisdom is rather a sense of the potential, of the way to deal with the kind of thing that may happen" (Frye, 123).

"Only when we realize that nothing is new can we live with an intensity in which everything becomes new" (Frye, 124).

"We are all born lost in a fores: if we assume either that the forest is there or that it is not there, we shall follow the rhythm of nature and walk-enlessly in circles. The metaphor of fog or mist present in 'vanity' suggest that life is something to find a way through, and that the way of wisdom is the way out" (Frye, 124).

"The apocolypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared" (Frye, 138).

"The great religious leaders do not write: they talk" (Frye, 213).

FRYE IS AMAZING.