This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
The aim that comedy has in view is the same as that of the highest destiny of man, and this consists in liberating himself from the influence of violent passions, and taking a calm and lucid survey of all that surrounds him, and also of his own being, and of seeing everywhere occurrence rather than fate or hazard, and ultimately rather smiling at the absurdities than shedding tears and feeling anger at sight of the wickedness of man.
Anger | Character | Comedy | Destiny | Fate | Hazard | Influence | Man | Tears | Wickedness | Fate |
I’m learning the difference between humor and comedy, between the laugh that lasts forever and the one that evaporates as soon as it hits the air. Humor is giving, and comedy is taking away. Humor is companionable, comedy cold. Humor is character, comedy personality.
Character | Comedy | Giving | Humor | Learning | Personality |
If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
Comedy | Detachment | Experience | Tragedy |
Every why hath a wherefore. -The Comedy of Errors. Act ii. Sc. 2.
Comedy |
Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Oxford
Life is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel.
Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Oxford
This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.
[Comedies], in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. 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 attachments to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.
Comedy | Happy | Joy | Life | Life | Rank | Revelation | Tragedy |
Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies
Seldom do we realize that the world is practically no thicker to us than the print of our footsteps on the path. Upon that surface we walk and act our comedy of life, and what is beneath is nothing to us. But it is out from that under-world, from the dead and the unknown, from the cold moist ground, that these green blades have sprung.
Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
When you get in these people when you...get these people in, say: 'Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that' ah, without going into the details... don't, don't lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, 'the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.' And, ah because these people are plugging for, for keeps and that they should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the country, don't go any further into this case, period!
No, the Golden Mean is not a sunny, untroubled nullity, but a deep awareness of possibilities, with one eye cocked toward Comedy and the other eye skewed toward Tragedy, and out of this feat of balanced observation emerges Humor, not as a foolish amusement or an escape from reality, but as a breadth of perception, and what Heracleitus called an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre. A reconciliation of opposites, indeed.
Awareness | Comedy | Observation | Reconciliation | Awareness |
I am sure that I would not make a good taxidermist; the temptation to improve upon nature would certainly be too strong for me. Think how easy it would be, when stuffing somebody's pet terrier, to slip a couple of human glass eyes into sockets, instead of the usual buttons. Then the owner would really be justified in saying that his pet looked almost human. If I were stuffing this two-headed calf, for instance, I could not resist making one head smile and the other one frown, so that they looked like masks of Comedy and Tragedy.
Comedy | Good | Nature | Smile | Temptation | Temptation | Think |
Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
Lord! haven't I seen you with the greatest authors in your hands, and don't I know how ready your attention is to wander when it's a book that asks for it, instead of a person?
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
The rest of the people know the condition of the country, for they live in it, but Congress has no idea what is going on in America, so the President has to tell 'em.
If you live in a dark cellar too long, you will hate the sunshine. You may even have lost the power of the eye to tolerate light. From this comes hatred toward sunlight.