M. H. Abrams

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

— M. H. Abrams

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly…

— M. H. Abrams

Life without literature is a life reduced to penury.

— M. H. Abrams

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.

— M. H. Abrams

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

— M. H. Abrams

I think the hardest thing to teach a student is that what he or she puts down on paper is changeable. It's…

— M. H. Abrams

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

We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible…

— M. H. Abrams

At first, students tend to freeze at the first effort. The breakthrough comes when they realize that they can make it better…

— M. H. Abrams

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

— M. H. Abrams

If you don't set your writing - teaching - at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop…

— M. H. Abrams

When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.

— M. H. Abrams

When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that. I think its heyday has passed,…

— M. H. Abrams

Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.

— M. H. Abrams

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

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

— M. H. Abrams

John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.

— M. H. Abrams

I think most of the things I published have been published out of desperation, not because they were perfected.

— M. H. Abrams

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

— M. H. Abrams