Quotes by Lionel Trilling

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“Educating a son I should allow him no fairy tales and only a very few novels. This is to prevent him from having 1. the sense of romantic solitude (if he is worth anything he will develop a proper and useful solitude) which identification with the hero gives. 2. cant ideas of right and wrong, absurd systems of honor and morality which never will he be able completely to get rid of, 3. the attainment of ideals, of a priori desires, of a priori emotions. He should amuse himself with fact only: he will then not learn that if the weak younger son do or do not the magical honorable thing he will win the princess with hair like flax.”

“The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.”

“In the American metaphysic, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.”

“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.”

“Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.”

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

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

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

“What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.”

“The immature artist imitates. Mature artists steal.”