“A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.”
"Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," Polemic (March 1947) - Full text online http://orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf]
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George Orwell473
English author and journalist 1903–1950Related quotes
“It is precisely what he does not know which may destroy him.”
Patrick Swift (1927–1983) British artist
X magazine (1959-62)
Context: The Art of painting is itself an intensely personal activity. It may be labouring the obvious to say so but it is too little recognised in art journalism now that a picture is a unique and private event in the life of the painter: an object made alone with a man and a blank canvas... A real painting is something which happens to the painter once in a given minute; it is unique in that it will never happen again and in this sense is an impossible object. It is judged by the painter simply as a success or failure without qualification. And it is something which happens in life not in art: a picture which was merely the product of art would not be very interesting and could tell us nothing we were not already aware of. The old saying, “what you don’t know can’t hurt you”, expresses the opposite idea to that which animates the painter before his canvas. It is precisely what he does not know which may destroy him.
Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 250
Eric Gill (1882–1940) British artist
Art Nonsense and Other Essays (1929), published by Cassell; quoted in Eric Gill: Man of Flesh and Spirit by Malcolm Yorke, published by Tauris Parke ISBN 1-86064-584-4, p. 49
Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) German politician, statesman, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate
Speech in Berlin (29 November 1924), quoted in W. W. Coole (ed.), Thus Spake Germany (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1941), p. 330
1920s
Joseph Wood Krutch (1893–1970) American writer, critic, and naturalist
The Great Chain of Life (1956), Chapter 9 "The Vandal and the Sportsman" http://books.google.com/books?id=Ydc0cooCB6QC&lpg=PA146&q="when+a+man+wantonly+destroys+one+of+the+works+of+man+we+call+him+vandal+when+he+wantonly+destroys+one+of+the+works+of+god+we+call+him+sportsman"#v=onepage. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009, p. 148.
Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor
" The Problem of Increasing Human Energy http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1900-06-00.htm", Century Illustrated Magazine (June 1900)
“Man, when he does not grieve, hardly exists.”
Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet
El hombre, cuando no se lamenta, casi no existe.
Voces (1943)
Charles Sumner (1811–1874) American abolitionist and politician
Speech on "The Scholar, the Jurist, the Artist, the Philanthropist," oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard University at their anniversary (August 27, 1846)
Ryszard Kapuściński (1932–2007) Polish historian
Attributed to an anonymous Iranian in Shah of Shahs, Vintage International edition, p. 3