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"This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking."
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Exlpore more Creativity quotes
"Imagination is the creative force that through necessity yields solutions to resolve the issues that face us."
"No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist."
"But the detail of the poem shows power akin to genius, and reveals to us that much neglected law of literary history -- that potential genius can never become actual unless it finds or makes the Form which it requires."
"The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal that you can gather votes like box tops is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process."
"And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right."
"We are all artists, painting the world with our thoughts while coloring the universe with our deeds."
"If you ever desire to give birth to anything at all, then you cannot do without solitude."
"Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it."
"Like most arts, the link between the mind and the pen can chain you like an enslaved workaholic. Even on an intended vacation you suddenly have this killer urge to record whatever the vacation may teach."
Explore more quotes by 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."
"We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us."
"There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination."
"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."
"The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather."
"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."
"Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony."
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