Lionel Trilling Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

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

Lionel Trilling
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
Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

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

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

Lionel Trilling
Occasions are rare when the best literature becomes, as it were, the folk literature, and generally speaking literature has always been carried on within small limits and under great difficulties.

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

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

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

Lionel Trilling
A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Lionel Trilling
The aspects of society that humanism most exalts are justice and continuity. That is why humanism is always being presented with a contradiction. For when it speaks of justice it holds that the human condition is absolute; yet when it speaks of continuity it implies that society is not absolute but pragmatic and even anomalous. Its intelligence dictates the removal of all that is anomalous; yet its ideal of social continuity is validated by by its perception that the effort to destroy anomaly out of hand will probably bring new and even worse anomalies, the nature of man being what it is. "Let justice be done though the heavens fall" is balanced by awareness that after the heavens fall justice will not ever be done again.

Lionel Trilling
Arnold must have for us the something of the character of what we nowadays have taken to calling a "culture hero": that is, a man who gives himself in full submission and sacrifice to his historical moment in order to comprehend and control the elements which that moment brings.

Lionel Trilling
The poet, it is true, is an effect of environment, but we must remember that he is no less a cause. He may be used as the barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

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

Lionel Trilling
Rousseau... is aesthetically revolted by the trashiness of what, some twenty years ago, David Riesman called the 'other-directed' personality, which he saw becoming ever-more salient in our society. This is the personality whose whole being is attuned to catch the signals sent out by the consensus of his fellows and by the institutional agencies of the culture, to the extent that he is scarcely a self at all, but, rather, a reiterated impersonation.

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

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 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
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
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