Four French Plays Quotes

“What I can claim is that no other work of mine depicts virtue with greater prominence: here the slightest misdemeanour is severely punished; the mere thought of wrongdoing is viewed with as much horror as the enactment of it; lapses that derive from love are treated as absolute failings; the passions are represented only to demonstrate the destructive anarchy to which they give rise; and vice is everywhere portrayed in colours which cause its ugliness to be known for what it is and abhorred.”
― Jean Racine, Cinna / The Misanthrope / Andromache / Phaedra

“He was particularly dissatisfied with Aristotle’s insistence that tragedy should invariably depict the downfall of a flawed or ‘middling’ hero, insisting instead that what made a tragedy was the severity of the threat rather than the play’s actual outcome.”
― Jean Racine, Cinna / The Misanthrope / Andromache / Phaedra