Leavis F Quotes & Sayings

In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends ... They are still a minority, though a larger one, who are capable of endorsing such first-hand judgement by genuine personal response. — F.R. Leavis

To the extent that people overpay as a result of the Libor manipulation, they should be able to get their money back. Individuals who have mortgages, pension funds who had pensioner investments - whoever was ripped off is entitled to get their money back. — Peter Welch

Reason is not what decides love. — Moliere

Witchcraft isn't about picking up a book, and asking forgiveness.. or learning about spirituality through the words of others. What you learn from those books are the opinions of other people, and not your own. If this is what you believe then you are not an individual. Witchcraft is about accepting that YOU are responsible for the choices that YOU have made, and YOU teaching YOURSELF to make the right choices. Its about learning through YOUR OWN opinions, YOUR OWN life lessons, YOUR OWN inner self, and by doing so.. BECOME an individual. — Carla VanKoughnett

Now if you'll excuse me, real life is calling and there's no room for self-righteous, delusional little girls. Big boys only. — Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

I'm not a parent yet, but I feel like a kid needs to be loved. — Jennifer Westfeldt

F.R. Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel
for theeighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions
did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment. — Angela Carter

A man's most vivid emotional and sensuous experience is inevitably bound up with the language that he actually speaks. (New Bearings in English Poetry) — F.R. Leavis

The "great tradition" does not brook even the possibility of libidinal gratification between the pages as an end in itself, and FR Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. — F.R. Leavis

Find peace in the morning rush and you will have a good day. — Michael Dolan

Indeed, every sin, in its own nature, has a tendency towards a final apostacy; but there is a provision in the covenant of grace, and the Lord, in His own time, returns to convince, humble, pardon, comfort, and renew the soul. He touches the rock, and the waters flow. By repeated experiments and exercises of this sort (for this wisdom is seldom acquired by one or a few lessons), we begin at length to learn that we are nothing, have nothing, can do nothing, but sin. And thus we are gradually prepared to live more out of ourselves, and to derive all our sufficiency of every kind from Jesus, the fountain of grace. — John Newton

The Arden Shakespeare is intended both as a student text and as a revision of traditional scholarship. If it is to be used in the first way, then the often narrow thread of text above a sediment of footnotes, something Dr Leavis so deplored, can prove debilitating. Poems, especially the classics of our language, should be read headlong. Dubieties may be looked up later. — Peter Porter

If businesses don't know from state to state what the requirements are for taxes, they have to waste a lot of money on accountants and lawyers before deciding to expand their business into the state next door. — Bob Goodlatte

A good deal of Paradise Lost strikes one as being almost as mechanical as bricklaying. — F.R. Leavis

I saw a documentary on how ships are kept together. Riveting! — Stewart Francis

Poetry can communicate the actual quality of experience with a subtlety and precision unapproachable by any other means. — F.R. Leavis

Everything under the sun is in tune but the sun is eclipsed by the moon — Roger Waters

You need to keep people close. You need to give them access to your heart. — Mitch Albom

It is Nature that causes all movement. Deluded by the ego, the fool harbors the perception that says "I did it". — Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

The force of originality "that made Donne so potent an influence in the seventeenth century makes him now at once for us, without his being the less felt as of his period, contemporary - obviously a living poet in the most important sense." In "The Good-Morrow" Leavis said that — John Donne

I do not approach my life tactfully at all, i'm incredibly impulsive and I am definitely an intense weirdo. I love living and I love people. They trip me out and I want to know more about them all the time. That isn't something I can turn off and on. — Kristen Stewart

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis's comments on them, and burned them. — A.S. Byatt

It is well to start by distinguishing the few really great - the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life. — F.R. Leavis

The only way to escape misrepresentation is never to commit oneself to any critical judgement that makes an impact - that is, never to say anything. I still, however think that the best way to promote profitable discussion is to be as clear as possible with oneself about what one sees and judges, to try and establish the essential discriminations in the given field of interest, and to state them as clearly as one can (for disagreement, if necessary). — F.R. Leavis

My Name
Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go. — Mark Strand

Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness. — F.R. Leavis