63 Quotes by Lionel Trilling

We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.

Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.

Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.

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

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.

There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty

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

Freud ... showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind ; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty.