Daily Inspiration Quote by M. H. Abrams

A critic’s credo disguised as a mild anthropological shrug. Abrams’s line doesn’t flatter humanity as noble; it frames humanity as our inescapable subject, the one topic we can’t stop returning to because it is also the medium through which we perceive everything else. The phrase “we are human” is doing quiet but forceful work: it establishes a limit on objectivity. Even our supposed escapes - nature, the cosmos, pure form - get filtered through appetites, fears, rivalries, and longing. If there’s a bias here, Abrams argues, it’s not a moral failing but a built-in condition of attention.

The subtext is a defense of why art and criticism keep circling back to character, motive, feeling, and social life. Abrams spent his career mapping how Romantic writers shifted the focus of literature from the classical mirror (art reflecting the world) to the lamp (art projecting an inner life). This sentence carries that legacy: what’s “interesting” is not scenery but the human consciousness that turns scenery into meaning. It’s also an implicit rebuke to criticism that tries to bleach literature into systems, structures, or detached technique. A novel isn’t merely a machine of narrative; a poem isn’t just prosody. They’re pressure chambers for human experience.

Contextually, coming from a 20th-century critic who lived through modernism, war, and the rise of theory, the line reads like a calm insistence that the humanities justify themselves not by utility but by obsession: we study stories, language, and images because we’re trying to understand the animal doing the studying.