Quotes by Lionel Trilling

Lionel Trilling

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.

Giving

Judging

Writing

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

Conscious

Swimming

Wind

Disgust is expressed by violence, and it is to be noted of our intellectual temper that violence is a quality which is felt to have a peculiarly intellectual sanction. Our preference, even as articulated by those who are most mild in their persons, is increasingly for the absolute and extreme, of which we feel violence to be the true sign. The gentlest of us will know that the tigers of wrath are to be preferred to the horses of instruction and will consider it intellectual cowardice to take into account what happens to those who ride tigers.

Horse

Intellectual

Wrath

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.

Ends

Judgment

Neurosis

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

Language

Righteous

States

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

Materials

Metaphysical

Reality

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

Art

Disbelief

Life

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.

Class

Names

Science

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.

Attitude

Believe

Men

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.

Class

Differences

Reality

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Acceptance

Art

Artist

Attitude

Believe

Book

Class

Conscious

Cynical

Differences

Disbelief

Ends

Fantasy

Giving

Giving Up

Hands

Heart

Horse

Imagination

Immature

Intellectual

Judging

Judgment

Kind

Language

Life

Mark

Materials

Men

Metaphysical

Mind

Mistake

Mutation

Names

Neurosis

Pain

Poet

Reading

Reality

Righteous

Science

Self

Shapes

States

Stealing

Swimming

Thinking

Wind

Wrath

Writing

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Quotes by Lionel Trilling

Lionel Trilling

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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