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Top Lionel Trilling Quotes

Browse top 20 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Lionel Trilling.

Favorite Lionel Trilling Quotes

1. "Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood." ~ Lionel Trilling
2. "Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal." ~ Lionel Trilling
3. "Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect." ~ Lionel Trilling
4. "The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather." ~ Lionel Trilling
5. "What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have." ~ Lionel Trilling
6. "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
7. "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
8. "Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony." ~ Lionel Trilling
9. "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
10. "We are all ill: but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health." ~ Lionel Trilling
11. "Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere." ~ Lionel Trilling
12. "This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking." ~ Lionel Trilling
13. "Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over." ~ Lionel Trilling
14. "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
15. "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
16. "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
17. "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
18. "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
19. "...perhaps we have never been more than vocal and perhaps soon we can hope to be no more than thoughtful..." ~ Lionel Trilling
20. "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

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Today's Quote

Through the eyes of a happy girl lies guilt and destruction."
Author: Britany Lopez

What Did Lionel Trilling Talk About?

Wit
Con
Lit
Ten
Per
Thou
Though
Tan
Use
Self
Thin
Ought
Once
Moral
Lie
King
Idea
Era
End
Culture
Act

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