Lionel Trilling Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Lionel Trilling quote about:
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“Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.”
-- Lionel Trilling -
“Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.”
-- Lionel Trilling -
“Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.”
-- Lionel Trilling -
“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 -
“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 -
“The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.”
-- 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 to the end that someone else should not perform the same process.”
-- 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 -
“We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.”
-- Lionel Trilling -
“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 -
“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 -
“Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.”
-- Lionel Trilling -
“In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.”
-- 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 -
“What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.”
-- 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 -
“Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.”
-- Lionel Trilling -
“There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.”
-- Lionel Trilling -
“Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.”
-- 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 -
“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
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