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Lionel Trilling Quotes

Lionel Trilling Quotes & Quotations
Name:
Lionel Trilling
Type:
Critic
Nationality:
American
Birth day:
July 4
Birth year:
1905

  • 1
    Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere. Lionel-TrillingLionel Trilling
  • 2
    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-TrillingLionel Trilling
  • 3
    Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal. Lionel-TrillingLionel Trilling
  • 4
    It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief. Lionel-TrillingLionel Trilling
  • 5
    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-TrillingLionel Trilling
  • 6
    The immature artist imitates. Mature artists steal. Lionel-TrillingLionel Trilling
  • 7
    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-TrillingLionel Trilling
  • 8
    The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather. Lionel-TrillingLionel Trilling
  • 9
    There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination. Lionel-TrillingLionel Trilling
  • 10
    This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking. Lionel-TrillingLionel Trilling
  • 11
    We are all ill: but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health. Lionel-TrillingLionel Trilling
  • 12
    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-TrillingLionel Trilling
  • 13
    We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us. Lionel-TrillingLionel Trilling
  • 14
    What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have. Lionel-TrillingLionel Trilling
  • 15
    Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over. Lionel-TrillingLionel Trilling