And just as there are no words for the surface, that is, No words to say what it really is, that it is not... Superficial but a visible core, then there is No way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a few days I'll have lived one score and three days in this vale of tears. On I plod--always bored, often drunk, doing no penan...ce for my faults--rather do I become more tolerant of myself from day to day, hardening my crystal heart with blasphemous humor and shunning only toothpicks, pathos, and poverty as being the three unforgivable things in life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our medieval historians who prefer to rely as much as possible on official documents because the chronicles are unreliable, fall t...hereby into an occasionally dangerous error. The documents tell us little about the difference in tone which separates us from those times; they let us forget the fervent pathos of medieval life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great th...inker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When Ernest Hemingway died by his own hand, he was in deep depression and had written little of value for a long time. Scott Fitzg...erald, when he died, regarded by the world as a failure, was fighting his drink problem successfully, and was doggedly in the middle of The Last Tycoon, whose quality clearly confirms that his genius was intact. Who was the failure, who the hero? A writer is not an athlete, not a civic leader, not a politician; his personality may be flawed and his life a ruin, but the one fight that defines him is the fight to stay with his work, and not to betray it. On those terms, "poor Scott" was battling in the arena to the end, and his pathos is not the pathos of failure, but the pathos of greatness; and that greatness grows year by year.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »