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. — M. H. Abrams Copy Share Image
Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you’re doing. It shows you possibilities you haven’t thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself.… — 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
