Top 35 Lionel Trilling Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “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.”

— Lionel Trilling

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

— Lionel Trilling

4. “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

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

— Lionel Trilling

6. “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

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

— Lionel Trilling

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

— Lionel Trilling

9. “Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.”

— Lionel Trilling

10. “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.”

— Lionel Trilling

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

— Lionel Trilling

12. “Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.”

— Lionel Trilling

13. “I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.”

— Lionel Trilling

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

— Lionel Trilling

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

— Lionel Trilling

16. “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

17. “Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.”

— Lionel Trilling

18. “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

19. “What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.”

— Lionel Trilling

20. “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

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

— Lionel Trilling

22. “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.”

— Lionel Trilling

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

— Lionel Trilling

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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.”

— Lionel Trilling

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

— Lionel Trilling

28. “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

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

— Lionel Trilling

30. “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

31. “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.”

— Lionel Trilling

32. “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

33. “By most people the ‘sense of reality’ is understood to be the submission to events and indeed illusion is often salvation.”

— Lionel Trilling

34. “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.”

— Lionel Trilling

35. “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

36. “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.”

— Lionel Trilling

37. “We have all in some degree become anarchistic.”

— Lionel Trilling