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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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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
Makes
Judging
Properly
Art
Demand
Error
Nature
Worth
Demands
Doe
Virtue
Errors
Mind
Mistake
Judge
Something
Reading
Critics
Perceptions
Make
Freedom
Mistakes
Critic
Life
Upon
Perception
Besides

More quotes by 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.
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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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Immature ists imitate. Mature ists steal.
Lionel Trilling
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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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In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.
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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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It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.
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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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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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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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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We have all in some degree become anarchistic.
Lionel Trilling
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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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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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Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader
Lionel Trilling
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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.
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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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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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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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