Lionel Trilling Quotes (23 Quotes)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the American metaphysic, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.

This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Educating a son I should allow him no fairy tales and only a very few novels. This is to prevent him from having 1. the sense of romantic solitude (if he is worth anything he will develop a proper and useful solitude) which identification with the hero gives. 2. cant ideas of right and wrong, absurd systems of honor and morality which never will he be able completely to get rid of, 3. the attainment of ''ideals',' of a priori desires, of a priori emotions. He should amuse himself with fact only he will then not learn that if the weak younger son do or do not the magical honorable thing he will win the princess with hair like flax.

We are all ill: but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.