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

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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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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Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.
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Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
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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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Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader
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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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There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.
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Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.
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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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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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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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Immature ists imitate. Mature ists steal.
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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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.
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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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In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.
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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