M. H. Abrams Quotes

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Man can no more think without words than see without light.

In order to begin an analysis, there must already be a synthesis present in the mind.

To see is to think, and to think is to see.

Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute. Metaphorical thinking is essential to how we understand ourselves and others, how we communicate and learn, discover and invent.

Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.

Without words to objectify and categorize our sensations and place them in relation to one another, we cannot evolve a tradition of what is real in the world.

Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech.

There is no aspect of our experience not molded in some way by metaphor's almost imperceptible touch.

Reason enables us to get around in the world of ideas, but cannot prescribe our thoughts.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

Our relationship to reality and to our experience is all based upon the ideas in our mind that we're always trying to live up to.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind

WHAT a person thinks is determined by HOW a person thinks.

The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid , uninteresting, petty and chaotic.

We think in language. We think in words. Language is the landscape of thought.

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.

It is not that things give meaning to words; it is that meaning makes things "things." It does not make things in their subsistence; but it does make things in their discreteness for the understanding.

By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.

Thinking... is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas

Then there is the further question of what is the relationship of thinking to reality. As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement. That is to say, one can feel a sense of flow in the stream of consciousness not dissimilar to the sense of flow in the movement of matter in general. May not thought itself thus be a part of reality as a whole? But then, what could it mean for one part of reality to 'know' another, and to what extent would this be possible?

To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one's own world, which comes to the same thing).

What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.