What I really want to say I can't define

Sublimity

“In ordinary life, nothing is truly great which it is great to despise; wealth, honor, reputation, absolute power—anything in short which has a lot of external trappings—can never be supremely good to the wise man because it is no small good to despise them” (Longinus, 138).

People spend their lives chasing after material possessions and wealth, believing them to be the source of true sublimity. In reality these people are fools, wasting their lives, chasing false happiness. I agree with Longinus here, anything that has a lot of external trappings cannot be sublime. These things are too easily lost, and have no universality to them.

“Real sublimity contains much food for reflection, is difficult or rather impossible to resist, and makes a strong and ineffaceable impression on the memory. In a word, reckon anything those things which pleases everybody all the time as genuinely and finely sublime. When people of all different trainings, ways of life, tastes, ages, and manners all agree about something, the judgment and assent of so many distinct voices lends strength and irrefutability to the conviction that their admiration is rightly directed” (Longinus, 138).

Sublimity is subjective. Longinus argues that real sublimity is ‘those things which pleases everybody all the time’ but this cannot be true. If I find something sublime, but every other person does not agree with me at all times, it does not discount the sublimity I have found in it.

“Sublimity produced at the right moment, tears everything up like a whirlwind, and exhibits the orator’s true power at a single blow” (Longinus, 137).

Longinus. "On The Sublime." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.