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:

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. (Lionel Trilling)
Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect. View quote
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. View quote
Lionel Trilling
It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief. View quote
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. View quote
Lionel Trilling
There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination. View quote
Lionel Trilling
We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Lionel Trilling
The definitions of humanism are many, but let us here take it to be the attitude of those men who think it an advantage to live in society, and, at that, in a complex and highly developed society, and who believe that man fulfills his nature and reaches his proper stature in this circumstance. The personal virtues which humanism cherishes are intelligence, amenity, and tolerance; the particular courage it asks for is that which is exercised in the support of these virtues. The qualities of intelligence which it chiefly prizes are modulation and flexibility. (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. View quote
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. View quote
Lionel Trilling
After all, no one is ever taken in by the happy ending, but we are often divinely fuddled by the tragic curtain. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Lionel Trilling
We have all in some degree become anarchistic. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Lionel Trilling
Rousseau ... is aesthetically revolted by the trashiness of what, some twenty years ago, David Riesman called the 'other-directed' personality, which he saw becoming ever-more salient in our society. This is the personality whose whole being is attuned to catch the signals sent out by the consensus of his fellows and by the institutional agencies of the culture, to the extent that he is scarcely a self at all, but, rather, a reiterated impersonation. (Lionel Trilling)
Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood. View quote
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. View quote
Lionel Trilling
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather. View quote
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. View quote
Lionel Trilling