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Lionel Trilling [1905-1975] American

Rank: 103
Critic, Literary critic

Lionel Mordecai Trilling was an American literary critic, short story writer, essayist, and teacher. He was one of the leading U.S. critics of the twentieth century who traced the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature.

Art, Equality, Health, Humor, Imagination, Legal, Poetry, Power

Quote	Tags	Rank
Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.	Art	101
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.		102
What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.	Art, Power	103
Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.		104
We are all ill: but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.	Health	105
We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.	Equality	106
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.	Poetry	107
It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.		108
This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking.		109
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.	Legal	110
The immature artist imitates. Mature artists steal.		111
Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.		112
The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.		113
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.		114
Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.		115
Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.	Humor	116
Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.		117
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.		118
There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.	Imagination	119

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