Quotes from Lionel Trilling

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.

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

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

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

Insanity is a direct and appropriate response to the coercive inauthenticity of society ... it is an act, expressing the intention of the insane person to meet and overcome to coercive situation; and whether or not it succeed in this intention, it is at least an act of criticism which exposes the true nature of society

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.

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

I see no reason in morality, why literature should not have as one of its intentions the arousing of thoughts of lust. It is one of the effects, perhaps one of the functions of literature to arouse desire, and I can discover no grounds for saying that sexual pleasure should not be among the objects of desire which literature presents to us, along with heroism, virtue, peace, death, food, wisdom, God, etc.

In any genre it may happen that the first great example contains the whole potentiality of the genre. It has been said that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato. It can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.

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 condemned and sought to exclude is accorded a considerable moral authority by reason of the authenticity claimed for it, for example, disorder, violence, unreason.

Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go in to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.

It is hard to believe that the declaration of antifascism is nowadays any more a mark of sufficient grace in a writer than a declaration against disease would be in a physician or a declaration against accidents would be in a locomotive engineer. The admirable intention in itself is not enough and criticism begins and does not end when the intention is declared.

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 awareness of heroism and destiny has now become chiefly a matter for the historical scholar.

By most people the 'sense of reality' is understood to be the submission to events and indeed illusion is often salvation.

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 courage. He seems to have thought, and very likely he was right, that they might come in handy as revolutionary virtues.

Academic time moves quickly. A college year is not really a year, lacking as it does three months. And it is endlessly divided into units which, at their beginning, appear larger than they are — terms, half terms, months, weeks. And the ultimate unit, the hour, is not really an hour, lacking as it does ten minutes.

Hoffendahl is, in the effect he has upon others, not unlike what is told of Bakunin himself in his greatest days, when he could enthrall with his passion even those who could not understand the language he spoke in. But it is possible that James also had the famous Johann Most in mind. Most figured in the London press in 1881 when he was tried because his newspaper, Freiheit, exulted in the assassination of the Czar.

perhaps we have never been more than vocal and perhaps soon we can hope to be no more than thoughtful...

For a key perception of the book is that most human beings are not ideologues; intellectual coherence is not a notable feature of their politics. People's political views may be rigid but they are not necessarily rigorous. They tend to derive from, or to be reflections of, some mixture of sentiment, custom, and moral aspiration.

Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind," as he puts it in the essay on Partisan Review, "we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.

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.

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

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