Lionel Trilling Quotes

38 quotes in 563 categories

• 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…
• Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
• In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.
• 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…
• What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.
• Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.
• The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.
• Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.
• There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.
• Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.
• 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…
• 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…
• I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.
• The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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 poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.

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