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Authors:

Lionel Trilling quotes

American Critic July 4, 1905 – November 5, 1975

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Quotes

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... Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling quote: "It is now life and not art that requires the willing..."
It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief. Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling quote: "Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not..."
Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over. Lionel Trilling
Ma? is an inextricable tangle of culture and biology. And not being simple, he is not simply good; he ha? 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... 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
Lionel Trilling quote: "There is no connection between the political ideas of our..."
There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination. 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
Lionel Trilling quote: "What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of..."
What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have. Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling quote: "We are all ill: but even a universal sickness implies an idea..."
We are all ill: but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health. 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
Lionel Trilling quote: "This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned..."
This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking. 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
Lionel Trilling quote: "Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are..."
Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere. Lionel Trilling
Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty. Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling quote: "Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal."
Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal. Lionel Trilling

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