Quotes by Lionel Trilling

About Lionel Trilling:

Lionel Mordecai Trilling was an American literary critic, author, and teacher. With wife Diana Trilling, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review. He was one of the leading U.S. critics of the twentieth century who traced the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

Lionel Trilling

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

Lionel Trilling

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 conde...

Lionel Trilling

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

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

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

Lionel Trilling

The immature artist imitates. Mature artists steal.

Lionel Trilling

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

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 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

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

Lionel Trilling

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 som...

Lionel Trilling

Nowadays our sense of history is being destroyed by the nature of our history - our memory is short and it grows shorter under the rapidity of the assault of events. What once occupied all our minds and filled the musty meeting halls with the awarene...

Lionel Trilling

Orwell clung with a kind of wry, grim pride to the old ways of the last class that had ruled the old order. He must sometimes have wondered how it came about that he should be praising sportsmanship and gentlemanliness and dutifulness and physical co...

Lionel Trilling

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.

Lionel Trilling

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

Lionel Trilling

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

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

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

Lionel Trilling

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 Trilling

Author Bio

  • NameLionel Trilling
  • DescriptionAmerican academic
  • BornJuly 4, 1905
  • DiedNovember 5, 1975
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionLiterary Critic; Writer; Novelist
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship