from the sublime to the ridiculous

1. From the beautiful to the silly, from great to puny. For example, They played first Bach and then an ad jingle—from the sublime to the ridiculous. The reverse, from the ridiculous to the sublime, is used with the opposite meaning. Coined by Tom Paine in The Age of Reason (1794), in which he said the two are so closely related that it is but one step from one to the other, the phrase has been often repeated in either order.

Example Sentences

From the sublime to the ridiculous, things go on.

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Struggling against his own delight in the music, the self-identified antisemitic critic William Ritter wrote of the premiere that “what blinded us was the way it swung from the sublime to the ridiculous.”

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From the sublime to the ridiculous: I liked how you talked about how a smaller barrier to entry, but a real one, to this kind of connection-based “self-help” can be the annoyance of committing to something.

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When I asked The Washington Post’s readers recently what books they thought ended most disappointingly, the responses ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, that is from Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” to Stephen King’s “It.”

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Djenepo is an alluring player but the Mali winger has a tendency to flicker from the sublime to the ridiculous and sliced painfully wide in the second half as the hosts applied further heat.

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