"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. (p. 215)"

"I'm a Blakean, a visionary disciple...But I'm always torn between feeling that the cock crows because he has a vision of the dawn, or because he feels stimulated by standing on top of a pile horseshit. (1942, entry #24)"

"A community`s art is its spiritual vision. (p. 206)"

"Nothing is more remarkable in the Bible than the absence of argument...Argument is internal continuity. So is logical sequence in narrative: in the Bible the connectives are just "and." (p. 200)"

"Belief has nothing to do with knowledge, & credo ut intelligam [I believe in order that I might understand] is horseshit. (p. 209)"

"A literary critic of experience never defines anything. (p. 4)"

"The "flow of information," which is mostly misinformation, is actually a presentation of myths. And people are increasingly rejecting the prescribed myths & developing their own counter-myths. (p. 97)"

"Nobody seriously thinks of television as a viewer's mode of perception...No matter how much he wants people to look at his product, the advertiser doesn't realize that television is [the viewer's] way of looking at him, & not his way of reaching them. (p. 95-6)"

"An aphorism is not a cliche: it penetrates & bites. It has wit, and consequently an affinity with satire...Christ speaks in aphorisms, not because they are alive, but because he is. (p. 108)"

"The soul is an immaculate virgin...Then it goes out and gets fucked by the world all day long & staggers back a baggy-eyed old whore, still hoping that after a sleep the Moment of purification will come again. (p. 27)"

"Under the stimulation of a "great age" or certain period of clarity in art a wider diffusion of genius becomes actual suggests to me that it is always potential. (p. 8)"

"If I had been on the hills of Bethlehem in the year one, I do not think I should have heard angels singing because I do not hear them now, & there is no reason to suppose that they have stopped.(p. 74)"

"Education is a set of analogies to a genuinely human existence, of which the arts are the model. Merely human life is of course a demonic analogy or parody of genuinely human life. (p. 149)"

"[Students] have to learn that ideas do not exist until they have been incorporated into words. Until that point you don’t know whether you are pregnant or just have gas on the stomach. (p. 746)"

"I must have God on my own terms, because God on somebody else’s terms is an idol. (p. 61)"

"I have never had the sort of experience the mystics talk about, never felt a revelation of reality through or beyond nature, never felt like Adam in Paradise, never felt, in direct experience, that the world is wholly other than it seems...The nearest I have come to such experiences are glimpses of my own creative powers...and these are moments or intervals of inspiration rather than vision. I’m not sure that I want it unless I can have clarity about other things with it. (p. 60–1)"

"The objective world is only “material”: it’s there, but it could be there in a great many different forms and aspects...Even here there [are] still possibilities: it can’t be just anything. But perhaps extracting a finite schema from the variety of mythologies, literatures, or religions might contribute something to the understanding of what some of these possibilities could be. The individual can’t create his own world, except in art or fantasy: society can only create a myth of concern. What fun if one could get just a peep at what some of the other worlds are that a new humanity could create–no, live in. (p. 287-8)"

"I give the impression of elusiveness sometimes, and rightly, because I really do have an inner chamber in my temple I'm not mature enough to open. (2:618)"

"The mark of a great writer: who sees his own time, but with a detachment that makes him communicable to other ages. (2:579)"

"What’s transcendental in Blake is not the statically geometrical, but the sense of arrested energy: the wriggling vines & snakes, flames & the like...It’s an expression of the belief that every object is an event. (p. 14)"

"One of the major activities of art consists in sharpening the edge of platitudes to make them enter the soul as realities. (p. 7)"

"The real Bible is a sealed book, an apocryphon, a book not to be opened (mentally) until its time has come. (2:568)"

"Yesterday's kook book becomes tomorrow's standard text. (2:495)"

"The worst thing we can say about God is that he knows all. The best thing we can say of him is that, on the whole, he tends to keep his knowledge to himself. (2:568)"

"Finnegans Wake is a kind of hypnagogic structure, words reverberating on themselves without pointing to objects...This may be the hallucinatory verbal world within which God speaks. (1:399)"

"One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind. (1:313)"

"We are always in the place of beginning; there is no advance in infinity. (1:281)"

"If you haven't got an excremental vision you have no business setting up as a major satirist. (2:578-9)"

"I don`t want the reduction of religion to aesthetics, but the abolition of aesthetics & incorporating of art with the Word of God. (p. 7)"

"Man is born lost in a forest. If he is obsessed by the thereness of the forest, he stays lost and goes in circles; if he assumes the forest is not there, he keeps bumping into trees. The wise man looks for the invisible line between the "is" and the "is not" which is the way through. The street in the city, the highway in the desert, the pathway of the planets through the labyrinth of the stars, are parallel forms. (1:111)"

"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. (1:73)"

"All texts are incarnational, and the climax of the entire Christian Bible, "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us," is the most logocentric sentence ever written.(1:154)"

"The written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it re-creates the past in the present, and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination."

"Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions."

"My greater simplicity came from a deeper level than the labyrinth of the brain. (1:61-2)"

"The Great Code was a silly and sloppy book. It was also a work of very great genius. The point is that genius is not enough. A book worthy of God and of Helen [Frye's wife] must do better than that. (1:160)"

"The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death."

"The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for "literalists," becomes much simpler when we read it typologically, as a mosiac of allusions to Old Testament prophecy."

"Literally, the Bible is a gigantic myth, a narrative extending over the whole of time from creation to apocalypse, unified by a body of recurring imagery that "freezes" into a single metaphor cluster, the metaphors all being identified with the body of the Messiah, the man who is all men, the totality logoi who is one Logos, the grain of sand that is the world."

"Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind."

"We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks."

"The entire Bible, viewed as a "divine comedy," is contained within a U-shaped story of this sort, one in which man, as explained, loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation."

"The bedrock of doubt is the total nothingness of death. Death is a leveler, not because everybody dies, but because nobody understands what death means."

"A purely individualized myth is an obsession, sometimes a psychosis. A purely socialized myth is an ideology, which sooner or later also becomes obsessive or psychotic. A myth that has either the direct current of transcendence or the alternating current of imagination rises clear of this grisly antithesis. (2:716)"

"Genius is a power of the soul and that powers of the soul can be developed by everyone. (p. 8)"

"The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning."

"Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading."