63 Quotes by Lionel Trilling

Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.

We properly judge a critic’s virtue not by his freedom from error but by the nature of the mistakes he does make, for he makes them, if he is worth reading, because he has in mind something besides his perceptions about art in itself he has in mind the demands that he makes upon life.

Insanity is a direct and appropriate response to the coercive inauthenticity of society... it is an act, expressing the intention of the insane person to meet and overcome to coercive situation; and whether or not it succeed in this intention, it is at least an act of criticism which exposes the true nature of society.

By most people the ‘sense of reality’ is understood to be the submission to events and indeed illusion is often salvation.

Academic time moves quickly. A college year is not really a year, lacking as it does three months. And it is endlessly divided into units which, at their beginning, appear larger than they are – terms, half terms, months, weeks. And the ultimate unit, the hour, is not really an hour, lacking as it does ten minutes.

It is hard to believe that the declaration of antifascism is nowadays any more a mark of sufficient grace in a writer than a declaration against disease would be in a physician or a declaration against accidents would be in a locomotive engineer. The admirable intention in itself is not enough and criticism begins and does not end when the intention is declared.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

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

The immature artist imitates. Mature artists steal.