"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)"

"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)"

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

"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)"

"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)"

"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)"

"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)"

"[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)"

"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)"

"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)"

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

"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)"

"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)"

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

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

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

"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)"

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

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

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

"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)"

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

"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)"

"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)"

"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)"

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling "life is a dream" becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it."

"I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse."

"Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself."

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

"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)"

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

"The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared."

"The objective world is the order of nature, thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense experience, and words are the servomechanisms of reflection."

"The first thing that confronts us in studying verbal structures is that they are arranged sequentially, and have to be read or listened to in time."

"It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and where we have to surrender precision for flexibility."

"The operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power, formulas that become a focus of mental activity."

"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 gigantic technological structure, a skyscraper almost high enough to reach the moon. It looks like a single world-wide effort, but it's really a deadlock of rivalries; it looks very impressive, except that it has no genuine human dignity. For all its wonderful machinery, we know it's really a crazy ramshackle building, and at any time may crash around our ears. What the myth tells us is that the Tower of Babel is a work of human imagination, that its main elements are words, and that what will make it collapse is a confusion of tongues. All had originally one language, the myth says. That language is not English or Russian or Chinese or any common ancestor, if there was one. It is the language of human nature, the language that makes both Shakespeare and Pushkin authentic poets, that gives a social vision to both Lincoln and Gandhi. It never speaks unless we take the time to listen in leisure, and it speaks only in a voice too quiet for panic to hear. And then all it has to tell us, when we look over the edge of our leaning tower, is that we are not getting any nearer [to] heaven, and that it is time to return to the earth."

"Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total structure."

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

"Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns."

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