“There's something vile (and all the more vile because ridiculous) in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes.”
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Fernando Pessoa288
Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publi… 1888–1935Related quotes
“A man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket.”
John Dennis (1658–1734) British dramatist
The Gentleman's Magazine (1781), Vol. li. p. 324.
Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister
Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart
John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic
Mornings in Florence, part III, section 49 (1875).
Joseph Campbell book The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Campbell follows with a quote from Ovid's Metamorposes, "All things are changing; nothing dies..."
Chapter 2
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949)
Context: The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man.... Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms... the two are the terms of a single mythological theme... the down-going and the up-coming (kathados and anodos), which together constitute the totality of the revelation that is life, and which the individual must know and love if he is to be purged (katharsis=purgatorio) of the contagion of sin (disobedience to the divine will) and death (identification with the mortal form).
Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers
Socrates, 5.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 2: Socrates, his predecessors and followers
Emma Goldman book Anarchism and Other Essays
Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), The Hypocrisy of Puritanism
Horace Walpole (1717–1797) English art historian, man of letters, antiquarian and Whig politician
Letter 123 To Robert Jephson (13 July 1777)
“Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.”
Angela Carter book Wise Children
Source: Wise Children (1991), ch. 5 (p.213).