“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

“He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands.”

“Farce may often border on tragedy; indeed, farce is nearer tragedy in its essence than comedy is.”

“At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all.”

“Hegel once observed that comedy is in act superior to tragedy and humourous reasoning superior to grandiloquent reasoning. Although Lincoln does not possess the grandiloquence of historical action, as an average man of the people he has its humour.”

“... Freud in fact defines hysteria as the conflict of two incompatible wishes, as Hegel defined tragedy as the conflict of two incompatible necessities.”

“Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostagic and hopeful all at the same time.”

“Primitive man has lived twice: once in and for himself, and the second time for us, in our reconstruction.”

“For no fact is so simple we believe it at first sight,
And there is nothing that exists so great or marvellous
That over time mankind does not admire it less and less.”
Sed neque tam facilis res ulla est, quin ea primum difficilis magis ad credendum constet, itemque nil adeo magnum neque tam mirabile quicquam, quod non paulatim minuant mirarier omnes.

“Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement… says heaven and earth in one word… speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.”