Barometer Quote by Lionel Trilling

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

— Lionel Trilling

The definitions of humanism are many, but let us here take it to be the attitude of those men who think it an advantage…

— Lionel Trilling

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

— Lionel Trilling

A primary function of art andthought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit…

— Lionel Trilling

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

— Lionel Trilling

It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual…

— Lionel Trilling

Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all…

— Lionel Trilling

Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on…

— Lionel Trilling

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

— Lionel Trilling

“...perhaps we have never been more than vocal and perhaps soon we can hope to be no more than thoughtful...”

— Lionel Trilling

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

— Lionel Trilling

Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various…

— Lionel Trilling