Byron's revealing line, "And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'Tis that I may not weep," suggests that the comic sense is parasitic...al upon the tragic. In order to avoid our tragic encounters with the transitoriness of passing fact, the fading of beauty, the destructive consequences of moral evil, alienation from the primary source of value, we make fun. The making of fun where no real occasion for fun exists is essentially what comedy is about. Tragedy and comedy are, indeed, but two masks worn by the same character alternately, depending on the exigencies of the moment; that is, depending upon which mask best represents him in such a way as successfully to reduce the unacceptable tensions of his ambience. Thus the obvious truth of Socrates' argument at the end of the Symposium. Both tragedy and comedy are but one-sided expressions of the ironic sensibility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By "object" is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is commonplace that a problem stated is well on its way to solution, for statement of the nature of a problem signifies that th...e underlying quality is being transformed into determinate distinctions of terms and relations or has become an object of articulate thought.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought. If... we are to continue talking about "data" in any other sense than as reflective distinctions, the original datum is always such a qualitative whole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The only thing that is unqualifiedly given is the total pervasive quality; and the objection to calling it "given" is that the wor...d suggests something to which it is given, mind or thought or consciousness or whatever, as well possibly as something that gives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is merely a linguistic peculiarity, not a logical fact, that we say "that is red" instead of "that reddens," either in the sens...e of growing, becoming, red, or in the sense of making something else red.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Alcoholism is a search for a common language, or at least, it is a compensation for a language that has been lost. The use of drug...s does not imply the overestimation of the value of language but of silence. Drunkenness exaggerates communication; drugs destroy it. Young people's preference for drugs reveals a change in the contemporary attitude toward language and communication. The first to see the differences between drugs and wine was Baudelaire: "Wine exalts the will; hashish destroys it. Wine is a physical stimulant; hashish a suicidal weapon. Wine mellows us and makes us sociable; hashish isolates us." Wine is social, drugs solitary; the one inflames the senses, the other rouses the imagination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'What is truth?' said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Pilate was in advance of his time. For 'truth' itself is a...n abstract noun, a camel, that is, of a logical construction, which cannot get past the eye even of a grammarian. We approach it cap and categories in hand: we ask ourselves whether Truth is a substance ... or a quality ... or a relation.... But philosophers should take something more nearly their own size to strain at. What needs discussing rather is the use, or certain uses, of the word 'true.' In vino, possibly, 'veritas,' but in a sober symposium 'verum.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we can get that realistic feminine morality working for us, if we can trust ourselves and so let women think and feel that an u...nwanted child or an oversize family is wrong--not ethically wrong, not against the rules, but morally wrong, all wrong, wrong like a thalidomide birth, wrong like taking a wrong step that will break your neck--if we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we'll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and be...cause we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »