Lionel Trilling Quotes

American - Critic | July 4, 1905 - November 5, 1975

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

Lionel Trilling

MisunderstandingOthersUnderstood

The immature artist imitates. Mature artists steal.

Lionel Trilling

ArtistMatureImmatureArtistsSteal

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

Lionel Trilling

CultureVirtueActIntellectSign

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

EqualityKnowPoorEqualProgressive

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

CultureSocietySelfLiteratureHigh

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Lionel Trilling

ArtCultureEnvironmentalPerception

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

HeartBelieveLivingAuthoritarian

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

Lionel Trilling

GreatIdeasThinkingViceRather

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

Lionel Trilling

HealthSicknessUniversalIdeaEven

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

Lionel Trilling

LifeArtNowWillingDisbelief

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

Lionel Trilling

PowerArtPainArtistShapeMarks

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

FantasyMarkPoetHeNeuroticHis

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