M. H. Abrams quotes
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M. H. Abrams Quotes



Quotes by M. H. Abrams - (20 quotes)

M. H. Abrams - From the Books category:

Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. (M. H. Abrams)

M. H. Abrams - From the Desperation category:

I think most of the things I published have been published out of desperation, not because they were perfected. (M. H. Abrams)

M. H. Abrams - From the Editing category:

I think the hardest thing to teach a student is that what he or she puts down on paper is changeable. It's not the final thing, it's the first thing, which may just be the suggestive, vague identification of something that you have to come back to and rewrite. (M. H. Abrams)

M. H. Abrams - From the Education category:

When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas. (M. H. Abrams)

M. H. Abrams - From the Effort category:

Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading. (M. H. Abrams)

M. H. Abrams - From the Fashion category:

When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that. I think its heyday has passed, but it's had an effect and will continue to have an effect. (M. H. Abrams)

M. H. Abrams - From the Future category:

If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false. (M. H. Abrams)

M. H. Abrams - From the Humanity category:

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. (M. H. Abrams)

M. H. Abrams - From the Keys category:

Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions. (M. H. Abrams)

M. H. Abrams - From the Listening category:

We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background. (M. H. Abrams)

M. H. Abrams - From the Masters category:

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable. (M. H. Abrams)

M. H. Abrams - From the Masters category:

-on Robert Frost...
He always violated your expectations... He was a character. (M. H. Abrams)

M. H. Abrams - From the Masters category:

-on his student Harold Bloom...
Indisputably a genius and one of the great flamboyant characters of our era. (M. H. Abrams)

M. H. Abrams - From the Philosophy category:

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves. (M. H. Abrams)

M. H. Abrams - From the Pleasure category:

It's a pleasure that you don't outgrow the anthology. (M. H. Abrams)

M. H. Abrams - From the Poetry category:

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem. (M. H. Abrams)

M. H. Abrams - From the Possibilities category:

Literature expands you in every way. It illuminates what you're doing. It shows you possibilities you haven't thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens you, it makes you more human. It makes life enjoyable. (M. H. Abrams)

M. H. Abrams - From the Survival category:

The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives. (M. H. Abrams)

M. H. Abrams - From the Teaching category:

At first, students tend to freeze at the first effort. The breakthrough comes when they realize that they can make it better - can identify what their purposes were and realize better ways to achieve those purposes. (M. H. Abrams)

M. H. Abrams - From the Teaching category:

If you don't set your writing - teaching - at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop their intellectual muscle. (M. H. Abrams)