Lionel Trilling quotes

Lionel Trilling was an American literary critic, essayist, and professor, known for his influential work in 20th-century literary theory. His writings explored the intersection of literature, culture, and society, often focusing on moral and intellectual issues. He became one of the leading figures of the New York Intellectuals and profoundly shaped American literary criticism. Here are 40 of his quotes:

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

Lionel Trilling

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

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

Lionel Trilling

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.

Lionel Trilling

There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.

Lionel Trilling

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

Lionel Trilling

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

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

Lionel Trilling

At the bottom of at least popular Marxism there has always been a kind of disgust with humanity as it is and a perfect faith in humanity as it is to be.

Lionel Trilling

Somewhere in the child, somewhere in the adult, there is a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological necessity, and biological reason that culture cannot reach and that reserves the right, which sooner or later it will exercise, to judge the culture and resist and revise it.

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.

Lionel Trilling

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

Lionel Trilling

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

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

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

We have all in some degree become anarchistic.

Lionel Trilling

It is one thing, then, to say, "The Bible contains the religion revealed by God," and quite another to say, "Whatever is contained in the Bible is religion, and was revealed by God." If the latter be accepted, metaphor and allegory become literal statements and the errors and absurdities of bibliolatry follow.

Lionel Trilling

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

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

Lionel Trilling

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

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

Lionel Trilling

The spectator, we might put it, contracts by infection the characteristic disease of the actor, the attenuation of selfhood that results from impersonation.

Lionel Trilling