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.

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.

Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.

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.

The doctrines of Calvinism involved a reversal of values with which Arnold became increasingly concerned. Work had always been a curse and a means, but it had now turned into a blessing and an end. The production of goods had become an end in itself and the consumption of goods only the means to further production. The factory was not made for man but man for the factory.

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

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.

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.

We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.

Economic man and the Calvinist Christian sing to each other like voices in a fugue. The Calvinist stands alone before an almost merciless God; no human agency can help him; his church is a means to political and social organization rather than a bridge to deity, for no priest can have greater knowledge of the divine way than he himself; no friend can console him — in fact, he should distrust all men; in the same fashion, Economic Man faces a merciless world alone and unaided, his hand against every other's.

The spectator, we might put it, contracts by infection the characteristic disease of the actor, the attenuation of selfhood that results from impersonation.

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.

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.

Disgust is expressed by violence, and it is to be noted of our intellectual temper that violence is a quality which is felt to have a peculiarly intellectual sanction. Our preference, even as articulated by those who are most mild in their persons, is increasingly for the absolute and extreme, of which we feel violence to be the true sign. The gentlest of us will know that the tigers of wrath are to be preferred to the horses of instruction and will consider it intellectual cowardice to take into account what happens to those who ride tigers.

The prototypical act of the modern intellectual is his abstracting himself from the life of the family. It is an act that has something about it of ritual thaumaturgy—at the beginning of our intellectual careers we are like nothing so much as those young members of Indian tribes who have had a vision or a dream which gives them power on condition that they withdraw from the ordinary life of the tribe. By intellectuality we are freed from the thralldom to the familial commonplace, from the materiality and concreteness by which it exists, the hardness of the cash and hardness of getting it, the inelegance and intractability of family things. It gives us power over intangibles and imponderables such as Beauty and Justice, and it permits us to escape the cosmic ridicule which in our youth we suppose is inevitably directed at those who take seriously the small concerns of the quotidian world, which we know to be inadequate and doomed by the very fact that it is so absurdly conditioned—by things, habits, local and temporary customs, and the foolish errors and solemn absurdities of the men of the past.