Lionel Trilling Quotes
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Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.
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It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it.
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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.
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What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.
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Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.
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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.
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Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
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We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.
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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.
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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.
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There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.
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Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.
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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.
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Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.
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Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader
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Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding.
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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.
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The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.
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Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.
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We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.
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