63 Quotes by Lionel Trilling

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

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

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.

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

This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking.

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

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.

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.

The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.