Terry Eagleton quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Terry Eagleton

Terry Eagleton Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Terry Eagleton on Wise Famous Quotes.

All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill.

The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster.

Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.

Marxists want nothing more than to stop being Marxists. In this respect, being a Marxist is nothing like being a Buddhist or a billionaire.

But if we are not given his real name, then he does not have one.

There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.

The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they are winning.

Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.

Literary works quite often 'know' things that the reader does not know, or does not know yet, or perhaps will never know.

Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can't be used as a totem or fetish in that way.

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

We live in a world in which there is nothing that cannot be narrated, but nothing that needs to be either.

To relate a Beethoven sonata to the testicles is hardly in the style of traditional aesthetics.

Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.

If we are inspired only by literature that reflects our own interests, all reading becomes a form of narcissism.

As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith

For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.

Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.

Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.

Astonishingly, we are saved not by a special apparatus known as religion, but by the quality of our everyday relations with one another.

The fact that people are massed anonymously together may be in one sense an alienation, but in another sense it is a condition of their emancipation.

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.

It is thus the adventure of poetry, not the closure of philosophy, that most truly reflects the human condition.

If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.

Middle paths in tragedy are in notably short supply.

I hope to show in the process that critical analysis can be fun, and in doing so help to demolish the myth that analysis is the enemy of enjoyment.

Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.

I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.

Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.

When the Dublin-born Beckett was asked by a Parisian journalist whether he was English, he replied, 'On the contrary.

Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.

What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.

It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.

Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.

Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant.

Americans use the word 'dream' as often as psychoanalysts do.

Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world

Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.

Poetry is concerned not just with the meaning of experience, but with the experience of meaning.

You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.

Literary' feelings are responses to poems, not just states of emotion which occur in their presence.

The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.

What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods and vermin is ideology.

Baa Baa Black Sheep' makes Marx's Capital look like Mary Poppins.

That one can understand The Waste Land without even trying is consoling news for all students of literature.

Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.

Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone's different needs.

Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.

Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage.

Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.

Culture was now largely a matter of how to keep people harmlessly distracted when they were not working.

The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.

The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.

I say that virtue is really all about enjoying yourself, living fully; but of course it is far from obvious what living fully actually means.

It may well be that a liking for bananas is a merely private matter, though this is in fact questionable.

The fascinating is only a step away from the freakish.

The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.

the artist can never quite get on terms with God, who as far as creation goes has got there first and pulled off a product hard to beat.

Like the rest of us, Tom Paulin is a bundle of contradictions. At its finest, his work is brave, adventurous, original and wonderfully idiosyncratic.

If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.

To be outside any situation whatsoever is known as being dead.

If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.

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!

Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.

It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.

If the oppressed must be alert enough to follow the rulers' instructions, they are therefore conscious enough to be able to challenge them.

God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.

Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.

Nature is a bottom-line concept.

I attacked Dawkins's book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate.

Nationalism is like class. You have to have it in order to be rid of it.

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.

[God] is a kind of perpetual critique of instrumental reason.

[A] great deal of what we believe we do not know firsthand; instead we have faith in the knowledge of specialists.

It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.

Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.

Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it.

In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.

It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.

Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.

It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.

Nothing in human life is inherently private.

History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.

It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.

When one emphasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one always overemphasizes.

You don't bring about major political change simply by changing people's minds. It's their interests that need to be assailed, not their opinions.

Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.