“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 Pessoa 288
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.”
The Gentleman's Magazine (1781), Vol. li. p. 324.
Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

Mornings in Florence, part III, section 49 (1875).

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).

Socrates, 5.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 2: Socrates, his predecessors and followers

Letter 123 To Robert Jephson (13 July 1777)