Ivor A. Richards > Quotes

“Poetry is capable of saving us.”
― I.A. Richards

“A book is a machine to think with, but it need not, therefore, usurp the functions either of the bellows or the locomotive.”
― Ivor A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism

“A book is a machine to think with.”
― I.A. Richards

“The chief lesson to be learnt from it is the futility of all argumentation that precedes understanding. We cannot profitably attack any opinion until we have discovered what it expresses as well as what it states.”
― Ivor A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism

“An experience has to be formed, no doubt, before it is communicated, but it takes the form it does largely because it may have to be communicated.”
― Ivor A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism

“This essay is intended to serve as a reminder that immense and threatening divisions in mankind can spring from differences between virtues as well as from envies and greeds. When the virtues on each part are largely inapprehensible by the other, the danger is heightened by Man's natural fear of what he does not understand, and his inclination to suppose it not worth understanding. To attack it easier than to study. There are also, in this case of China and the West, intense and complex cultural vanities on both sides to be taken into account: vanities largely inexplicable the one to the other...”
― Ivor A. Richards, Richards on Rhetoric: I.A. Richards: Selected Essays

“...the evil influence of the imagery assumption...”
― Ivor A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric

“Our mother tongue, so far ahead of me,
Displays her goods, hints at each bond and link, Provides the means, leaves it to us to think,
Proffers the possibles, balanced mutually,
To be used or not, as our designs elect,
To be tried out, taken up or in or on, Scrapped or transformed past recognition,
Though she sustains, she’s too wise to direct.

Ineffably regenerative, how does she know
So much more than we can? How hold such store For our recovery, for what must come before
Our instauration, that future we will owe
To what? To whom? To countless of our kind,
Who, tending meanings, grew Man’s unknown Mind.”
― Ivor A. Richards

“One of the oddest of the many odd things about the whole topic is that we have no agreed distinguishing terms for these two halves of a metaphor — in spite of the immense convenience, almost the necessity, of such terms if we are to make any analyses without confusion.”
― Ivor A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric

“Provided always that we do not suppose that our account really tells us what happens provided, that is, we do not mistake our theories for our skill, or our descriptive apparatus for what it describes.”
― Ivor A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric

“Our skill with metaphor, with thought, is one thing — prodigious and inexplicable; our reflective awareness of that skill is quite another thing— very incomplete, distorted, fallacious, over-simplifying. Its business is not to replace practice, or to tell us how to do what we cannot do already; but to protect our natural skill from the interferences of unnecessarily crude views about it; and, above, all, to assist the imparting of that skill — that command of metaphor — from mind to mind. And progress here, in translating our skill into observation and theory, comes chiefly from profiting by our mistakes.”
― Ivor A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric

“1)In the simplest formulation, when we use a metaphor we have two thoughts of different things active together and supported by a single word, or phrase, whose meaning is a resultant of their interaction." ~ I. A. Richards


2)We believe a scientist because he can substantiate his remarks, not because he is eloquent and forcible in his enunciation. In fact, we distrust him when he seems to be influencing us by his manner.

3)Contempt is a well-recognized defensive reaction.

4)It is never what a poem says that matters, but what it is.

5)Thought is metaphoric, and proceeds by comparison, and the metaphors of language derive therefrom.

I. A. Richards”
― Ivor A. Richards

“Very simple experiences – a cold bath in an enamelled tin, or running for a train – may to some extent be compared without elaborate vehicles; and friends exceptionally well acquainted with one another may manage some rough comparisons in ordinary conversation. But subtle or recondite experiences are for most men incommunicable and indescribable, though social conventions or terror of the loneliness of the human situation may make us pretend the contrary.”
― Ivor A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism

“It is not surprising that the detailed analysis of metaphors, if we attempt it with such slippery terms as these, sometimes feels like extracting cube-roots in the head.”
― Ivor A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric

“In philosophy, above all, we can take no step safely without an unrelaxing awareness of the metaphors we, and our audience, may be employing; and though we may pretend to eschew them, we can attempt to do so only by detecting them. And this is the more true, the more severe and abstract the philosophy is. As it grows more abstract we think increasingly by means of metaphors that I’ve professed to be relying on. The metaphors we are avoiding steer our thought as much as those we accept.”
― Ivor A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric

“condiments”
― Ivor A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (Routledge Classics)

“However stone dead such metaphors seem, we can easily wake them up.”
― Ivor A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric