Lionel Trilling Quotes

Habit must play a larger place in our religious life. We worship when we feel like it, we pray when we feel like it. We read the Bible when we feel like it. Leaving our religious exercises to the promptings of impulse, we become creatures of impulse rather than soldiers of Christ. An army made up of creatures of impulse would be only a mob. So is a church.

If you're not religious, then look at it this way. This world of ours is four thousand, six hundred million years old. It could end in an afternoon.

The First Amendment isn't about free thought and free opinion and free belief. The First Amendment is about free exercise: the carrying into practice of religious principles and beliefs and convictions.

The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. One can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit.

From the age of 14 until I was 50, I just got on a treadmill and ran. I never stopped to assess what I was doing or to pat myself on the back.

I would describe my spirituality as exactly the opposite of having a religious affiliation.

You don't stop running because you get old, you get old because you stop running.

I feel like I'm in the best shape of my life at 45 ... I didn't know this exercise thing felt so good.

The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man's encounter with God is how he shall make the experience--which is both natural and supernatural--understandable, and credible, to his reader. In any age this would be a problem, but in our own, it is a well- nigh insurmountable one. Today's audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental.

Exercise and temperance can preserve something of our early strength even in old age.

I say that a Christian congregation can survive and often appear to prosper in the community by the exercise of human talent and without any touch from the Holy Spirit! All that religious activity and the dear people will not know anything better until the great and terrible day when our self-employed talents are burned with fire and only that which was wrought by the Holy Ghost will stand forever!

While the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.

After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

I don't think there are actually any theologians practicing angelology or studying angels anymore, but it's definitely in a lot of religious literature. It's still out there, and people are still interested. Even in the more secular way, books about angels are everywhere.

To preserve health is a moral and religious duty: for health is the basis of all social virtues; and we can be useful no longer than while we are well.

I have always felt that my work is religious, not sacrilegious. I would say that there are many individuals in the Church who appreciate it and who do not have a problem with it. The best place for Piss Christ is in a church.

I did used to like trampolining, but I’m probably past it, I think. You need to have a really strong pelvic floor to be good at trampolining, and I’ve had three children.

Anybody is qualified, according to everybody, for giving opinions upon poetry. It is not so in chemistry and mathematics. Nor is it so, I believe, in whist and the polka. But then these are more serious things.

You get religion as your hair turns grey.

I like to read a couple books at once. I was reading the Princess Diana book. I'm reading a book about Chicago and the mob. Right now I'm also reading the Bible, beginning to end. I'm very religious. That's how I've gotten to where I am.

Actually, when you get into your sixties and above, you want to think about exercise differently. It's not just about you know cardiovascular or lifting weights. It's also about avoiding accidents.

Staying in shape does not come easily, especially as you get older and you don't have as much time or energy to exercise.

The artist must be blind to distinction between 'recognized' or 'unrecognized' conventions of form, deaf to the transitory teaching and demands of his particular age.

I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment or free exercise of religion, but from that also which reserves to the States the powers not delegated to the United States. Certainly, no power to prescribe any religious exercise or to assume authority in any religious discipline has been delegated to the General Government. It must then rest with the States.