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The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society QUOTES

The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society QUOTES

1 " Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood "

― Lionel Trilling , The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society

2 " We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire’s, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, “It is later than you think.” But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time. "

― Lionel Trilling , The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society

3 " Man… is an inextricable tangle of culture and biology. And not being simple, he is not simply good; he has… a kind of hell within him from which rise everlastingly the impulses which threaten his civilization. He has the faculty of imagining for himself more in the way of pleasure and satisfaction than he can possibly achieve. Everything that he gains he pays for in more than equal coin; compromise and the compounding with defeat constitute his best way of getting through the world. His best qualities are the result of a struggle whose outcome is tragic. Yet he is a creature of love… "

― Lionel Trilling , The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society