M. H. Abrams Quotations

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

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.

When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.

John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.

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.

Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

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

Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

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

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.

I was never a monist - always a diversitarian.

Jews had an outsider's eye on a lot of Western tradition.

We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture.

Secular thinkers have no more been able to work free of the centuries-old Judeo-Christian culture than Christian theologians were able to work free of their inheritance of classical and pagan thought. The process... has not been the deletion and replacement of religious ideas but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation of religious ideas.

The first test any poem must pass is no longer, 'Is it true to nature?' but a criterion looking in a different direction: namely, 'Is it sincere? Is it genuine?'

The Romantics were whipping boys of the New Criticism, but they appealed to me anyway. I was recalcitrant. It was clear to me that they had thought innovatively.

Life without literature is a life reduced to penury.

Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It 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.

I think most of the things I published have been published out of desperation, not because they were perfected.

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.

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.

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.

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