Terry Eagleton Quotes

For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.

Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant.

Writing seems to rob me of my being: it is a second hand mode of communication, a pallid, mechanical transcript of speech, and so always at one remove from my consciousness.

The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.

It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.

The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.

Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.

You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!

Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.

Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.

Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.

I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.

The conversion of agnostic High Tories to the Anglican church is always rather suspect. It seems too pat and predictable, too clearly a matter of politics rather than faith.

The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.

Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world

The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster.

Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.

If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.

Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.

Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.

It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.

It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.

When one emphasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one always overemphasizes.

There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.

The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.

Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable.

Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage.

All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some object.

Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.

If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.

What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.

Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.

It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.

If the oppressed must be alert enough to follow the rulers' instructions, they are therefore conscious enough to be able to challenge them.

[God] is a kind of perpetual critique of instrumental reason.