Lionel Trilling Quotes - Page 2

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• 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.

  Lionel Trilling

  Thinking, Government, Class

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

  Lionel Trilling

  Literature, Possibility, Difficulty

  1950 The Liberal Imagination, preface.

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

  Lionel Trilling

  Giving Up, Book, Youth

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• In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.

  Lionel Trilling

  Reality, Metaphysical, Materials

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• 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.

  Lionel Trilling

  Fashion, Self, Desire

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• After all, no one is ever taken in by the happy ending, but we are often divinely fuddled by the tragic curtain.

  Lionel Trilling

  Taken, Happy Endings, Curtains

  Lionel Trilling (1963). “Matthew Arnold”

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• Freud ... showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind ; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty.

  Lionel Trilling

  Mind, Saws, Constitution

  Lionel Trilling (1955). “Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture. (2. Print.)”

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• We properly judge a critic's virtue not by his freedom from error but by the nature of the mistakes he does make, for he makes them, if he is worth reading, because he has in mind something besides his perceptions about art in itself - he has in mind the demands that he makes upon life.

  Lionel Trilling

  Art, Mistake, Reading

  "The Portable Matthew Arnold " by Lionel Trilling, Viking Press, 1949.

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• Economic man and the Calvinist Christian sing to each other like voices in a fugue. The Calvinist stands alone before an almost merciless God; no human agency can help him; his church is a means to political and social organization rather than a bridge to deity, for no priest can have greater knowledge of the divine way than he himself; no friend can console him - in fact, he should distrust all men; in the same fashion, Economic Man faces a merciless world alone and unaided, his hand against every other's.

  Lionel Trilling

  Christian, Fashion, Mean

  "Matthew Arnold". Book by Lionel Trilling, 1949.

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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.

  Lionel Trilling

  Reality, Class, Differences

  Lionel Trilling (2012). “The Liberal Imagination”, p.262, New York Review of Books

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• The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.

  Lionel Trilling

  Artist, Immature, Stealing

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

  Lionel Trilling

  Ideas, Sickness, Ill

  1950 The Liberal Imagination,'Art and Neurosis'.

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• Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader--it is never quite oneself. 2) I usually hate the sight of my handwriting--it lives too much and I dislike its life--I mean by "lives," of course, betrays too much!

  Lionel Trilling

  Life, Notebook, Hate

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• I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.

  Lionel Trilling

  Language, States, Righteous

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• It is told of Faraday that he refused to be called a physicist; he very much disliked the new name as being too special and particular and insisted on the old one, philosopher, in all its spacious generality: we may suppose that this was his way of saying that he had not over-ridden the limiting conditions of class only to submit to the limitation of a profession.

  Lionel Trilling

  Science, Class, Names

  Lionel Trilling, Leon Wieseltier (2009). “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays”, p.425, Northwestern University Press

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• Immature ists imitate. Mature ists steal.

  Lionel Trilling

  Art, Immature, Mature

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• 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.

  Lionel Trilling

  Religious, Exercise, Age

  "The Portable Matthew Arnold " by Lionel Trilling, Viking Press, 1949.

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

  Lionel Trilling

  Humor, Littles, Weapons

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• Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader

  Lionel Trilling

  Notebook, Journalism, Reason

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• If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one does not defend them merely from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but from the present bourgeoisie itself.

  Lionel Trilling

  Artist, Bourgeoisie, Doe

  "Partisan Review: 50th Anniversary Edition", ed. William Philips, 1985.

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• We have all in some degree become anarchistic.

  Lionel Trilling

  Degrees

  "The Portable Matthew Arnold " by Lionel Trilling, Viking Press, 1949.

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