Daily Inspiration Quote by Lionel Trilling

The line is a provocation dressed up as a proverb: it flatters the serious artist while daring the pious to clutch their pearls. Trilling, a critic who spent his career policing the border between culture and moral posturing, isn’t endorsing plagiarism so much as puncturing the sentimental myth of “originality” as spotless self-expression. “Imitate” names the obvious, reverent copying that leaves the source intact, like a student tracing an outline. “Steal” points to something more aggressive and more alive: taking a predecessor’s solution to a problem and making it unrecognizable by forcing it through your own obsessions, your own historical moment, your own style.

The subtext is that artistic influence is never neutral. To “steal” is to admit there’s a power struggle inside culture: works survive when they get repurposed, misread, and metabolized by the next person with sharper needs. Trilling’s diction also sneaks in a moral inversion. Theft is usually a vice; here it’s a badge of competence, implying that mature artists have earned the right to raid the tradition because they can pay it back with transformation.

Context matters: Trilling comes out of mid-century literary criticism, when modernism had already made collage, allusion, and remake into core techniques, and when anxieties about mass culture and authenticity were everywhere. The quote reads like a defense of high art’s evolutionary machinery: the canon isn’t a museum, it’s a tool shed. If you’re only imitating, you’re asking permission. If you’re stealing, you’re claiming lineage - and risking judgment.