Lionel Trilling Quotes - Interesting, Inspiring, Sharp, Shocking Thoughts of Renowned American Literary Critic, Narrator, Essayist, Teacher born on July 4, 1905 in New York City

Lionel Mordecai Trilling was born on July 4, 1905 in New York City. He became a popular American literary critic, narrator, essayist and teacher. He was one of the leading American critics of the 20th century who analyzed the contemporary cultural, social and political implications of literature. Along with his wife Diana Trilling (née Rubin), he became a member of the New York Intellectuals and a contributor to the Partisan Review. Lionel Trilling stirred readers, listeners, editors, thinkers etc. with his writings and ideas. Here are some mind-boggling thoughts of Lionel Mordecai Trilling

Some paradox of our nature leads us to the fact that once we make our fellow human beings the subject of our enlightened interest, we make them the subject of our pity, then of our intellect, and finally of our pressure.

Michael Faraday is said to have refused to be called a physicist; he disliked the new name so much because it was too special and exclusive and insisted on keeping the old name, philosopher, in its full generality, We may suppose that this was his way of saying that he had not abandoned the limited conditions of class merely to succumb to the limitations of profession.

We are so anarchic at heart that the only state in which we can imagine living is utopian and so cynical that the only utopianism in which we can believe is authoritarian.

It is probably impossible for humor ever to become a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do no more than create irony.

In American metaphysics, reality is always physical reality, harsh, resistant, unstructured, impenetrable, and unpleasant.

Now it is life, not art, that requires a willing suspension of disbelief.

Our culture particularly esteems the act of blaming, which it regards as a sign of virtue and intelligence.

The artist is identified with his power to give shape to the material of the pain that is in us all.

A primary function of art and thought is to free the individual from the tyranny of his culture in an environmental sense and to allow him to stand beyond it in autonomy of perception and judgment.

The aspects of society that humanism values ​​most are justice and continuity. This is why humanism is always presented with a paradox. For when it speaks of justice, it assumes that the human condition is absolute. Yet when it speaks of continuity, it implies that society is not absolute but pragmatic and even incoherent. Its wisdom dictates the removal of all that is incoherent. Yet its ideal of social continuity is validated by the assumption that an attempt to destroy incoherence by hand will likely bring about new and even worse incoherences, human nature being such. There may be justice even if the sky falls but it is balanced by the awareness that there will never be justice if the sky falls.

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

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every respect, except in being our equals.

Where misunderstanding benefits others, the individual is helpless to explain himself.

Immature artists copy. Mature artists steal.

Sigmund Freud showed us that poetry is rooted in the very structure of the mind. He saw the mind, for the most part, as having the capacity to create poetry.

The poet controls his imagination, while it is the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his imagination.

Rare are the occasions when the best literature becomes, as it were, folk literature, and generally speaking literature has always operated within small limits and great difficulties.

It is no longer art but life that demands the voluntary suspension of disbelief. If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one defends them not only from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but from the present bourgeois class itself.

It is true that the poet is an effect of the environment, but we must remember that he is no less a cause. He may be used as a barometer, but we must not forget that he is also part of the weather.

There is no connection between the political views of our educated class and the deeper realms of the imagination.

Even non-religious people can make aesthetic judgments in matters of religion and indeed our age has given unbelievers refined taste in religious literature.

The degradation of class reality, while socially desirable in many cases, has the practical effect of diminishing our ability to see people in their difference and uniqueness.

Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and a kind of politics we would not like. Jean-Jacques Rousseau rebels aesthetically against the uselessness of what David Riesman, some twenty years earlier, called the other-directed personality, which he saw becoming ever more prominent in our society. This is the personality whose whole existence is dependent on the consent and approval of its fellows.

Ideology is not a product of thought, it is a habit or ritual of showing respect for certain formulas with which we have a very strong attachment for various reasons connected with emotional security, of the meaning and consequences of which we really have no clear understanding.

Somewhere in the child, somewhere in the adult, there is a rigid, immutable, stubborn core of biological urgency, biological necessity and biological reason, which culture cannot reach and which reserves the right, which it will sooner or later exercise, to judge and oppose and modify culture.

At the core of at least popular Marxism there has always been a kind of hatred of humanity and an absolute distrust of humanity.

Whatever the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he returns to you in the form of money and property.

Liberalism is not only the dominant but also the only intellectual tradition in the United States at the moment.

We may say that the spectator acquires by infection the characteristic illness of the actor, the impairment of self-identity, which results from depersonalization.

We are all sick. But a universal disease also implies the idea of ​​health.

Abhorrence is expressed by violence, and it is noticeable of our intellectual nature that violence is a virtue which enjoys a special intellectual sanction. Our preference, expressed even by those who are most mild in their personality, is growing increasingly for the absolute and the extreme, of which we take violence to be the true sign. The most modest of us will know that the tigers of rage are to be preferred to the horses of learning and that it would be intellectual cowardice to take into account what happens to those who ride tigers.

We judge the true merits of the critic not by his freedom from mistakes but by the nature of the mistakes he makes, for if he is worth reading he makes mistakes because he has in mind something other than his own notions of art, he has in mind the demands that life makes.

So it is one thing to say that the Bible contains religion as revealed by God and quite another to say that everything in the Bible is religion and revealed by God. If the latter is accepted, metaphors and allegories become literal statements and the fallacies and absurdities of scripture worship emerge.

The author must define his audience according to their capacities, their perfection, in so far as he is able to understand them. If he cannot see his right audience within the immediate reach of his voice, he does well to direct his words to his spiritual ancestors, or to posterity, or even, if necessary, to a congregation. The author serves his demon and his subject. And a democracy which does not know that demon and subject must be served is not a democracy in any ideal sense.

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