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

- 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

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

- M. H. Abrams

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

- 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

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

- 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

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 ha…

- 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 not the final thing, it's the first thing,…

- M. H. Abrams