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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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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
Always
Resistant
Unpleasant
Metaphysical
Material
Materials
American
Reality
Unformed
Hard
Impenetrable

More quotes by 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.
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Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth.
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The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.
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If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one does not defend them merely from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but from the present bourgeoisie itself.
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It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.
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Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.
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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.
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Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.
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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.
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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.
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There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.
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We have all in some degree become anarchistic.
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Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader
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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.
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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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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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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.
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At the bottom of at least popular Marxism there has always been a kind of disgust with humanity as it is and a perfect faith in humanity as it is to be.
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.
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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.
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