“It's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
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Do you have more details about the quote "We can only begin to live when we conceive life as
Tragedy." by W.B. Yeats?
W.B. Yeats 255
Irish poet and playwright 1865–1939Related quotes
“Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.”
Dorothy Thompson
(1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster
Martin Luther King, Jr.
(1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement
1960s, Keep Moving From This Mountain (1965)
Context: Each of us lives in two realms, the "within" and the "without." The within of our lives is somehow found in the realm of ends, the without in the realm of means. The within of our [lives], the bottom — that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion for which at best we live. The without of our lives is that realm of instrumentalities, techniques, mechanisms by which we live. Now the great temptation of life and the great tragedy of life is that so often we allow the without of our lives to absorb the within of our lives. The great tragedy of life is that too often we allow the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live.
“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.”
Confucius
(-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher
“The tragedy of life is not death but what we let die inside of us while we live.”
Norman Cousins
(1915–1990) American journalist
“That we cannot rise equal to situations when we are in them — that is the tragedy of life.”
Henry Miller
(1891–1980) American novelist
Source: A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin Henry Miller, 1932-1953
Plato
(-427–-347 BC) Classical Greek philosopher
This quotation, often attributed on the Internet to Plato, cannot be found in any of Plato's writings, nor can it be found in any published work anywhere until recent years. If it really were a quotation by Plato, then some author in the recorded literature of the last several centuries would have mentioned that quote, but they did not. The sentiment isn't new, however. The ancient Roman Seneca, in his work on "Morals," quoted an earlier Roman writer, Lucretius (who wrote about the year 50 B.C.), as saying "we are as much afraid in the light as children in the dark." (Seneca was paraphrasing a longer passage by Lucretius from De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), Book II, lines 56 et seq.)
Misattributed