Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you’re doing. It shows… — M. H. Abrams Copy Share Image
If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem. — M. H. Abrams Copy Share Image
We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human… — M. H. Abrams Copy Share Image
It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable. — M. H. Abrams Copy Share Image
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… — M. H. Abrams Copy Share Image
The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives. — M. H. Abrams Copy Share Image
We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented… — M. H. Abrams Copy Share Image
At first, students tend to freeze at the first effort. The breakthrough comes when they realize that they can make it better - can… — M. H. Abrams Copy Share Image
If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false. — M. H. Abrams Copy Share Image
If you don't set your writing - teaching - at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop their intellectual… — M. H. Abrams Copy Share Image
When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas. — M. H. Abrams Copy Share Image
