
“Farce may often border on tragedy; indeed, farce is nearer tragedy in its essence than comedy is.”
20 August 1833
Table Talk (1821–1834)
San Manuel Bueno, Mártir (1933), Prologue
“Farce may often border on tragedy; indeed, farce is nearer tragedy in its essence than comedy is.”
20 August 1833
Table Talk (1821–1834)
“The essence of life is change, he said, and the essence of eternal life is eternal change.”
Source: Darwinia (1998), Chapter 25 (p. 209)
“The essence of things is eternal”
The Life of Pythagoras (1919)
Context: Fragment 4. This is the state of affairs about nature and harmony. The essence of things is eternal; it is a unique and divine nature, the knowledge of which does not belong to man. Still it would not not be possible that any of the things that are, and are known by us, should arrive to our knowledge, if this essence was not the internal foundation of the principles of which the world was founded, that is, of the finite and infinite elements. Now since these principles are not mutually similar, neither of similar nature, it would be impossible that the order of the world should have been formed by them, unless the harmony had intervened... the dissimilar things, which have neither a similar nature, nor an equivalent function, must be organized by the harmony, if they are to take their place in the connected totality of the world.
Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 25
Context: That had not been the first time nor had it been the last, but all the years of killing boiled down in essence to that single moment — not the time that came after, but that long and terrible instant when he had watched the lines of men purposefully striding up the slope to kill him.
It had been in that moment that he had realized the insanity of war, the futile gesture that in time became all but meaningless, the unreasoning rage that must be nursed long beyond the memory of the incident that had caused the rage, the sheer illogic that one man, by death or misery, might prove a right or uphold a principle.
Somewhere, he thought, on the long backtrack of history, the human race had accepted an insanity for a principle and had persisted in it until today that insanity-turned-principle stood ready to wipe out, if not the race itself, at least all of those things, both material and immaterial, that had been fashioned as symbols of humanity through many hard-won centuries.
“If you are killing time, are you damaging eternity?”
“It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes.”
Interview, The Paris Review (Summer 1956)
Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker
Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy https://books.google.co.in/books?id=K3c-CQAAQBAJ&pg=PA303&lpg=PA303&dq=Religion+must+mainly+be+a+matter+of+principles+only.+It+cannot+be+a+matter+of+rules.+The+moment+it+degenerates+into+rules,+it+ceases+to+be+a+religion,&source=bl&ots=Z580zN8EaN&sig=pw39zHdZTHfmGbLTLRRVLNX-WwA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CC4Q6AEwA2oVChMIxLm9qfeSyAIViAuOCh2Phg9p#v=onepage&q=Religion%20must%20mainly%20be%20a%20matter%20of%20principles%20only.%20It%20cannot%20be%20a%20matter%20of%20rules.%20The%20moment%20it%20degenerates%20into%20rules%2C%20it%20ceases%20to%20be%20a%20religion%2C&f=false