from the sublime to the ridiculous

Idioms  

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.

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

from the sublime to the ridiculous

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.

From The Guardian ● Feb. 22, 2020

Wan works mightily to lend the stiff action flamboyant style, but his garish near-miss proves that there’s only a short misstep from the sublime to the ridiculous.

From The New Yorker ● Dec. 29, 2018

Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, in the 1st century A.D. the poet Gaius Petronius Arbiter poked fun at the excesses of Roman society in a fictional work called “Satyricon.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 30, 2016

Not from the sublime to the ridiculous, perhaps, but sublimely ridiculous, and surely appealing to all brows, no matter their altitude.

From Washington Post ● Dec. 15, 2014

It was the step from the sublime to the ridiculous; so he ran off to his Alameda farm and remained there until the day before the steamer would leave for San Diego.

From The Squatter and the Don by C. Loyal

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