Top 18 Quotes by M. H. Abrams

I was never a monist - always a diversitarian.

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.

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

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

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?'

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

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

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