This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is a moment.
Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.
Death is not the greatest loss in life... The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives - the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the death of the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in yourself.
Awareness | Death | Glory | Life | Life | Man | Men | Pain | Tragedy | Loss | Awareness |
The tragedy of life is not death but in what dies inside a man while he lives - the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the death of awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in oneself.
Awareness | Death | Glory | Life | Life | Man | Men | Pain | Tragedy | Awareness |
Robert Quillen, fully Verni Robert Quillen
The tragedy of ignorance is its complacency.
Complacency | Ignorance | Tragedy |
If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
Comedy | Detachment | Experience | Tragedy |
The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
The metaphysical comfort - with which, I am suggesting even now, every true tragedy leaves us - that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable - this comfort appears in the incarnate clarity in the chorus of satyrs, a chorus of natural being who live ineradicably, as it were behind all civilization and remain eternally the same, despite the changes of generations and of the history of nations.
Georges Florovsky, fully Georges Vasilievich Florovsky
Orthodoxy is summoned to witness. Now more than ever the Christian West stands before divergent prospects, a living question addressed also to the Orthodox world… The ‘old polemical theology' has long ago lost its inner connection with any reality. Such theology was an academic discipline, and was always elaborated according to the same western 'textbooks.' A historiosophical exegesis of the western religious tragedy must become the new 'polemical theology.' But this tragedy must be reendured and relived, precisely as one's own, and its potential catharsis must be demonstrated in the fullness of the experience of the Church and patristic tradition. In this newly sought Orthodox synthesis, the centuries-old experience of the Catholic West must be studied and diagnosed by Orthodox theology with greater care and sympathy than has been the case up to now… The Orthodox theologian must also offer his own testimony to this world—a testimony arising from the inner memory of the Church—and resolve the question with his historical findings.
Care | Church | Experience | Memory | Question | Sympathy | Theology | Tragedy |
Gilda Radner, fully Gilda Susan Radner
While we have the gift of life, it seems to me the only tragedy is to allow part of us to die - whether it is our spirit, our creativity or our glorious uniqueness.
Creativity | Tragedy |
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
There are two aspects of individual harmony: the harmony between body and soul, and the harmony between individuals. All the tragedy in the world, in the individual and in the multitude, comes from lack of harmony. And harmony is the best given by producing harmony in one's own life.
Body | Harmony | Individual | Tragedy |