Lionel Trilling quotes - page 2

The aspects of society that humanism most exalts are justice and continuity. That is why humanism is always being presented with a contradiction. For when it speaks of justice it holds that the human condition is absolute; yet when it speaks of continuity it implies that society is not absolute but pragmatic and even anomalous. Its intelligence dictates the removal of all that is anomalous; yet its ideal of social continuity is validated by by its perception that the effort to destroy anomaly out of hand will probably bring new and even worse anomalies, the nature of man being what it is. "Let justice be done though the heavens fall" is balanced by awareness that after the heavens fall justice will not ever be done again. (Lionel Trilling)
Arnold must have for us the something of the character of what we nowadays have taken to calling a "culture hero": that is, a man who gives himself in full submission and sacrifice to his historical moment in order to comprehend and control the elements which that moment brings. View quote
Lionel Trilling
The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals. View quote
Lionel Trilling
Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere. View quote
Lionel Trilling
What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have. View quote
Lionel Trilling
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. View quote
Lionel Trilling
The writer serves his daemon and his subject. And the democracy that does not know that the daemon and the subject must be served is not, in any ideal sense of the word, a democracy at all. View quote
Lionel Trilling
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. View quote
Lionel Trilling
No literature has ever been so shockingly personal as that of our time - it asks every question that is forbidden by polite society. View quote
Lionel Trilling
The factory was not made for man but man for the factory. View quote
Lionel Trilling
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)
Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony. View quote
Lionel Trilling
Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over. View quote
Lionel Trilling
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. View quote
Lionel Trilling
A real book reads us. I have been read by Eliot's poems and by Ulysses and by Remembrance of Things Past and by The Castle for a good many years now, since early youth. Some of these books at first rejected me; I bored them. But as I grew older and they knew me better, they came to have more sympathy with me and to understand my hidden meanings. Their nature is such that our relationship has been very intimate. No literature has ever been so shockingly personal as that of our time - it asks every question that is forbidden by polite society. View quote
Lionel Trilling