Lionel Trilling Quotes

Best Quotes by Lionel Trilling (Top 10)

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
Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.
Lionel Trilling
Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.
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 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
It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.
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
Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.
Lionel Trilling
The immature artist imitates. Mature artists steal.
Lionel Trilling

Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
Lionel Trilling
Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.
Lionel Trilling
In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.
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
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