Lionel Trilling
Critic
1905-07-04
Quotes by Lionel Trilling
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.
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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.
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What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.
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The diminution of the reality of class, however socially desirable in many respects, seems to have the practical effect of diminishing our ability to see people in their difference and specialness.
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We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.
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Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding.
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Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
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Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.
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The poet ... may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
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Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.
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Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.
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We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.
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Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.
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In the American metaphysic, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.
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This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking.
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