Lionel Trilling Quotes

The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.

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

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

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

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

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

In any genre it may happen that the first great example contains the whole potentiality of the genre. It has been said that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato. It can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.

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.

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

Perhaps we have never been more than vocal and perhaps soon we can hope to be no more than thoughtful ...

Insanity is a direct and appropriate response to the coercive inauthenticity of society ... it is an act, expressing the intention of the insane person to meet and overcome to coercive situation; and whether or not it succeed in this intention, it is at least an act of criticism which exposes the true nature of society

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.

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

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

The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.

By most people the 'sense of reality' is understood to be the submission to events and indeed illusion is often salvation.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The immature artist imitates. Mature artists steal.

We have all in some degree become anarchistic.

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

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

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!