List of Terry Eagleton Quotes

The Conversion Of Agnostic High Tories To The Anglican Church Is Always Rather Suspect. It Seems Too Pat And Predictable, Too Clearly A Matter Of Politics Rather Than Faith.

I Value My Catholic Background Very Much. It Taught Me Not To Be Afraid Of Rigorous Thought, For One Thing.

What Was Needed Was A Literary Theory Which, While Preserving The Formalist Bent Of New Criticism, Its Dogged Attention To Literature As Aesthetic Object Rather Than Social Practice, Would Make Something A Good Deal More Systematic And 'scientific' Out Of All This. The Answer Arrived In 1957, In The Shape Of The Canadian Northrop Fryes Mighty 'totalization' Of All Literary Genres, Anatomy Of Criticism .

The Humanities Should Constitute The Core Of Any University Worth The Name.

Ideology... Is A Kind Of Contemporary Mythology, A Realm Which Has Purged Itself Of Ambiguity And Alternative Possibility.

Virtue Is Something You Have To Get Good At, Like Playing The Trombone Or Tolerating Bores At Parties. Being A Virtuous Human Being Takes Practice; And Those Who Are Brilliant At Being Human (what Christians Call The Saints) Are The Virtuosi Of The Moral Sphere - The Pavarottis And Maradonas Of Virtue.

You've Got To Have A Sense Of Different Audiences. I'm A Kind Of Performer Manque - I Come From A Long Line Of Failed Actors!

Those Who Sentimentally Indulge Humanity Do It No Favours.

Readers Are Less And Less Seen As Mere Non-writers, The Subhuman "other" Or Flawed Derivative Of The Author; The Lack Of A Pen Is No Longer A Shameful Mark Of Secondary Status But A Positively Enabling Space, Just As Within Every Writer Can Be Seen To Lurk, As A Repressed But Contaminating Antithesis, A Reader.

The Most Common Mistake Students Of Literature Make Is To Go Straight For What The Poem Or Novel Says, Setting Aside The Way That It Says It. To Read Like This Is To Set Aside The ‘literariness’ Of The Work – The Fact That It Is A Poem Or Play Or Novel, Rather Than An Account Of The Incidence Of Soil Erosion In Nebraska.

Man Eternally Tries To Get Back To An Organic Past That Has Slipped Just Beyond His Reach.

What Persuades Men And Women To Mistake Each Other From Time To Time For Gods Or Vermin Is Ideology. One Can Understand Well Enough How Human Beings May Struggle And Murder For Good Material Reasons - Reasons Connected, For Instance, With Their Physical Survival. It Is Much Harder To Grasp How They May Come To Do So In The Name Of Something As Apparently Abstract As Ideas. Yet Ideas Are What Men And Women Live By, And Will Occasionally Die For.