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

Lionel Trilling

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Lionel Trilling
Age: 70 †
Born: 1905
Born: July 4
Died: 1975
Died: November 5
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Queens
New York
Born Lionel Mordecai Trilling
Possibility
Literature
Fullest
Human
Precise
Humans
Complexity
Make
Account
Accounts
Difficulty
Activity

More quotes by Lionel Trilling

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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.
Lionel Trilling
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We have all in some degree become anarchistic.
Lionel Trilling
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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.
Lionel Trilling
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It is one thing, then, to say, The Bible contains the religion revealed by God , and quite another to say, Whatever is contained in the Bible is religion, and was revealed by God. If the latter be accepted, metaphor and allegory become literal statements and the errors and absurdities of bibliolatry follow.
Lionel Trilling
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Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.
Lionel Trilling
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We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.
Lionel Trilling
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The diminution of the reality of class, however socially desirable in many respects, seems to have the practical effect of diminishing our ability to see people in their difference and specialness.
Lionel Trilling
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Ideology is not the product of thought it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding.
Lionel Trilling
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Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.
Lionel Trilling
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Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader
Lionel Trilling
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I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.
Lionel Trilling
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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.
Lionel Trilling
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In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.
Lionel Trilling
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Immature ists imitate. Mature ists steal.
Lionel Trilling
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Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.
Lionel Trilling
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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.
Lionel Trilling
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Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.
Lionel Trilling
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The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.
Lionel Trilling
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There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.
Lionel Trilling
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The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.
Lionel Trilling