Quotes from Lionel Trilling

Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth.

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

This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.

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

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.

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

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

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

The immature artist imitates. Mature artists steal.

Even the nonreligious may exercise aesthetic judgment in matters of religion, and indeed our age has given the unbelieving a sophisticated taste in religious literature.

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.

Immature ists imitate. Mature ists steal.

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

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

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

Occasions are rare when the best literature becomes, as it were, the folk literature, and generally speaking literature has always been carried on within small limits and under great difficulties.

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.

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.

In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.

A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of government as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by government. Somewhere in between and In gradations is the group that has the sense that gov't exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly.

Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing -- he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.

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

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