Lionel Trilling famous quotes

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Art #Cynical #Immature

Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Swimming #Wind #Conscious

Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Understanding #Advantage #Understood

We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Believe #Heart #Cynical

The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Fantasy #Poet #Mark

The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Artist #Immature #Stealing

We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire's, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, "It is later than you think." But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Thinking #Wrath #Hands

Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader--it is never quite oneself. 2) I usually hate the sight of my handwriting--it lives too much and I dislike its life--I mean by "lives," of course, betrays too much!
-- Lionel Trilling

#Life #Notebook #Hate

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Weather #Poetry #May

It is told of Faraday that he refused to be called a physicist; he very much disliked the new name as being too special and particular and insisted on the old one, philosopher, in all its spacious generality: we may suppose that this was his way of saying that he had not over-ridden the limiting conditions of class only to submit to the limitation of a profession.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Class #Names #Special

It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Spiritual #Contemplation #Badness

I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Language #States #Righteous

Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Neurosis #Judgment #Ends

The diminution of the reality of class, however socially desirable in many respects, seems to have the practical effect of diminishing our ability to see people in their difference and specialness.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Reality #Class #Differences

We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Ideas #Sickness #Ill

At the bottom of at least popular Marxism there has always been a kind of disgust with humanity as it is and a perfect faith in humanity as it is to be.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Perfect #Humanity #Kind

If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one does not defend them merely from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but from the present bourgeoisie itself.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Artist #Bourgeoisie #Doe

Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Honor #Culture #Blame

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Equality #Sense Of Humor #Progressive

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Acceptance #Self #Mutation

Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Literature #Possibility #Difficulty

In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Reality #Metaphysical #Materials

Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Strong #Emotional #Ideas

What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Pain #Artist #Shapes

Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing - he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Writing #Giving #Judging

Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Revolution #Littles #Weapons

There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Class #Ideas #Imagination

Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Giving Up #Book #Youth

After all, no one is ever taken in by the happy ending, but we are often divinely fuddled by the tragic curtain.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Taken #Happy Endings #Curtains

The definitions of humanism are many, but let us here take it to be the attitude of those men who think it an advantage to live in society, and, at that, in a complex and highly developed society, and who believe that man fulfills his nature and reaches his proper stature in this circumstance. The personal virtues which humanism cherishes are intelligence, amenity, and tolerance; the particular courage it asks for is that which is exercised in the support of these virtues. The qualities of intelligence which it chiefly prizes are modulation and flexibility.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Attitude #Believe #Men

We have all in some degree become anarchistic.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Degrees

Disgust is expressed by violence, and it is to be noted of our intellectual temper that violence is a quality which is felt to have a peculiarly intellectual sanction. Our preference, even as articulated by those who are most mild in their persons, is increasingly for the absolute and extreme, of which we feel violence to be the true sign. The gentlest of us will know that the tigers of wrath are to be preferred to the horses of instruction and will consider it intellectual cowardice to take into account what happens to those who ride tigers.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Horse #Wrath #Intellectual

Even the nonreligious may exercise aesthetic judgment in matters of religion, and indeed our age has given the unbelieving a sophisticated taste in religious literature.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Religious #Exercise #Age

We properly judge a critic's virtue not by his freedom from error but by the nature of the mistakes he does make, for he makes them, if he is worth reading, because he has in mind something besides his perceptions about art in itself he has in mind the demands that he makes upon life.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Art #Mistake #Reading

Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity , then of our wisdom , ultimately of our coercion.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Men #Goes On #Fellow Man

It is one thing, then, to say, "The Bible contains the religion revealed by God ," and quite another to say, "Whatever is contained in the Bible is religion, and was revealed by God." If the latter be accepted, metaphor and allegory become literal statements and the errors and absurdities of bibliolatry follow.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Errors #Metaphor #Accepted

Economic man and the Calvinist Christian sing to each other like voices in a fugue. The Calvinist stands alone before an almost merciless God ; no human agency can help him; his church is a means to political and social organization rather than a bridge to deity , for no priest can have greater knowledge of the divine way than he himself; no friend can console him in fact , he should distrust all men; in the same fashion, Economic Man faces a merciless world alone and unaided, his hand against every other's.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Christian #Fashion #Mean

Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Humanity #Way #Wealth

Somewhere in the child, somewhere in the adult, there is a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological necessity , and biological reason that culture cannot reach and that reserves the right, which sooner or later it will exercise, to judge the culture and resist and revise it.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Children #Exercise #Judging

It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Life #Art #Disbelief

This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Fashion #Self #Desire

Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader
-- Lionel Trilling

#Notebook #Journalism #Reason

A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of government as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by government. Somewhere in between and In gradations is the group that has the sense that gov't exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Thinking #Government #Class

Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Imagination #Mind #Kind

Freud ... showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind ; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty.
-- Lionel Trilling

#Mind #Saws #Constitution