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

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

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.
Lionel Trilling

It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.
Lionel Trilling

It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it.
Lionel Trilling

Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.
Lionel Trilling

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

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

The immature artist imitates. Mature artists steal.
Lionel Trilling

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

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
Lionel Trilling

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.
Lionel Trilling

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