Lionel Trilling Quotes & Sayings

Immature artists imitate.
Mature artists steal. — Lionel Trilling

Disgust is expressed by violence, and it is to be noted of our intellectual temper that violence is a quality which is felt to have a peculiarly intellectual sanction. Our preference, even as articulated by those who are most mild in their persons, is increasingly for the absolute and extreme, of which we feel violence to be the true sign. The gentlest of us will know that the tigers of wrath are to be preferred to the horses of instruction and will consider it intellectual cowardice to take into account what happens to those who ride tigers. — Lionel Trilling

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

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

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

The immature artist imitates. Mature artists steal. — Lionel Trilling

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

It is one thing, then, to say, "The Bible contains the religion revealed by God ," and quite another to say, "Whatever is contained in the Bible is religion, and was revealed by God." If the latter be accepted, metaphor and allegory become literal statements and the errors and absurdities of bibliolatry follow. — 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 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

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

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. — 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

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

The poet may be used as a 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

Consistent affection for his characters is what sets Tolstoy apart. Flaubert is equally "objective," he says, but "Flaubert's objectivity is charged with irritability and Tolstoy's with affection. For Flaubert everyone and everything is somehow at fault. For Tolstoy everyone and everything has a saving grace."
"By loving people without cause, he discovered indubitable causes for loving them." It would be hard to find a more succinct description of the chief work of the Holy Spirit in the human heart. — Lionel Trilling

At the behest of the criterion of authenticity, much that was once thought to make up the very fabric of culture has come to seem of little account, mere fantasy or ritual, or downright falsification. Conversely, much that culture traditionally condemned and sought to exclude is accorded a considerable moral authority by reason of the authenticity claimed for it, for example, disorder, violence, unreason. — 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

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

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

Nowadays our sense of history is being destroyed by the nature of our history - our memory is short and it grows shorter under the rapidity of the assault of events. What once occupied all our minds and filled the musty meeting halls with the awareness of heroism and destiny has now become chiefly a matter for the historical scholar. — Lionel Trilling

I see no reason in morality, why literature should not have as one of its intentions the arousing of thoughts of lust. It is one of the effects, perhaps one of the functions of literature to arouse desire, and I can discover no grounds for saying that sexual pleasure should not be among the objects of desire which literature presents to us, along with heroism, virtue, peace, death, food, wisdom, God, etc. — 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

Our culture tends "to regard the mere energy of impulse as being in every mental and moral way equivalent and even superior to defined intention." Instead we should consider "an idea that once was salient in western culture: the idea of "making a life", by which was meant conceiving human existence, one's own or another's, as if it were a work of art upon which one might pass judgment ... This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self. — Lionel Trilling

Economic man and the Calvinist Christian sing to each other like voices in a fugue. The Calvinist stands alone before an almost merciless God ; no human agency can help him; his church is a means to political and social organization rather than a bridge to deity , for no priest can have greater knowledge of the divine way than he himself; no friend can console him in fact , he should distrust all men; in the same fashion, Economic Man faces a merciless world alone and unaided, his hand against every other's. — Lionel Trilling

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

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

We properly judge a critic's virtue not by his freedom from error but by the nature of the mistakes he does make, for he makes them, if he is worth reading, because he has in mind something besides his perceptions about art in itself he has in mind the demands that he makes upon life. — 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

I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language. — Lionel Trilling

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

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

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

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

Man ... is an inextricable tangle of culture and biology. And not being simple, he is not simply good; he has ... a kind of hell within him from which rise everlastingly the impulses which threaten his civilization. He has the faculty of imagining for himself more in the way of pleasure and satisfaction than he can possibly achieve. Everything that he gains he pays for in more than equal coin; compromise and the compounding with defeat constitute his best way of getting through the world. His best qualities are the result of a struggle whose outcome is tragic. Yet he is a creature of love ... — 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

Orwell clung with a kind of wry, grim pride to the old ways of the last class that had ruled the old order. He must sometimes have wondered how it came about that he should be praising sportsmanship and gentlemanliness and dutifulness and physical courage. He seems to have thought, and very likely he was right, that they might come in handy as revolutionary virtues. — Lionel Trilling

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

In the most secret heart of every intellectual ... there lies hidden ... the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man. — Lionel Trilling

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

Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth. — Lionel Trilling

We have all in some degree become anarchistic. — Lionel Trilling

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty. — Lionel Trilling

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