This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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.
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.
There is no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty.
The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations to be made between the self and the other, between being and non-being (the discovery of the scandal of death).
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 |
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 |
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 |
Life is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel.
In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.
This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.
If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.