Lionel Trilling Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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