Quotes about tragedy

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“The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.”

“The romantics would call this a love story, the cynics would call it a tragedy.”

“It isn't the big troubles in life that require character. Anybody can rise to a crisis and face a crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh—I really think that requires”

“Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights”

“Suicide is not a blot on anyone’s name; it is a tragedy”

“Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.”

“I knew that the deepest of tragedies was simple: to love, and not to be loved in return.”

“Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.”

“If there is any possible consolation in the tragedy of losing someone we love very much, it's the necessary hope that perhaps it was for the best.”

“But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell burst, the plummet of the car from a bridge.”

“The greatest tragedy in life is not death, but a life without a purpose.”

“What a tragic realm this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don't know it; they think they are free because they have never been free, and do not understand what it means.”

“Life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.”

“It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes.”

“There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.”

“Make whatever decision you wish but never forget one thing: all of you are much better than you believed. Take advantage of the chance that tragedy has given you; not everyone is capable of doing so”

“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”

“The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you're faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow, the world keeps turning, the seconds keep ticking.”

“Death is a great tragedy…a profound loss…I don’t accept it…I think people are kidding themselves when they say they are comfortable with death.”

“The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense.”

“I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.”

“The whole drama of the world is such tragedy that I am weary of the spectacle.”

“Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed.”

“The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that things are not mended again.”

“The saddest part of a broken heart
Isn't the ending so much as the start
The tragedy starts from the very first spark
Losing your mind for the sake of your heart”

“I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.”

“When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.
:This quote, often attributed to Jomo Kenyatta, was first written in a fiction play published by holocaust doubter Rolf Hochhuth, in his controversial The Deputy, a Christian tragedy (1964), Grove Press, p. 144. No reference to any historical or original source was given. Other citations are found in books written by critics of religion, such as Christos Tzanetakos's "The Life and Work of an Atheist Pioneer", iUniverse; and Jack Huberman's "Quotable Atheist: Ammunition for Nonbelievers, Political Junkies, Gadflies, and Those Generally Hell-Bound" (2008), 175. No references are given.
: In Desmond Tutu: A Biography (2004) by Steven Gish, p. 101; is clarified Tutu used it as a joke which was not of him.”

“Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounded like a quiet tragedy.”

“In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.”

“The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”

“When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.”

“I love you, with a touch of tragedy and quite madly.”

“Character is both developed and revealed by tests, and all of life is a test… You will be tested by major changes, delayed promises, impossible problems, unanswered prayers, undeserved criticism, and even senseless tragedies.”

“We are citizens of the world. The tragedy of our times is that we do not know this.”

“The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world.”

“One of the greatest tragedies in life is to watch potential die untapped.”

“Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.”

“I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy”

“The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me.”

“After all, tragedy didn't discriminate, so everyone was subject to the same whims of fate.”

“Time and tragedy have forced her to grow too quickly, at least for my taste, into a young woman who stitches bleeding wounds and knows our mother can hear only so much.”

“It’s not over if you’re still here,” Chronicler said. “It’s not a tragedy if you’re still alive.”

“The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy.”

“The tragedy of life is not so much what
men suffer, but rather what they miss.”

“Quite possibly there's nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summer, Hardesty thought. That's when you learn that the tragedy of plants is that they have roots.”

“Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more.”

“That is why most great love stories are tragedies.”

“The real Tragedy is the tragedy of the man who never in his life braces himself for his one supreme effort-he never stretches to his full capacity, never stands up to his full stature.”

“I understand that love and tragedy go hand in hand, for there can’t be one without the other, but nonetheless I find myself wondering whether the trade-off is fair.”

“That scent she threw off was not anything by Chanel. Unless they’d recently added a Tragedy line.”

“It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.”

“It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.”

“There Are But Two Tragedies in Life-One is One's Inability to attain One's Heart's Desire-The Other Is To Have It!”

“There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.”

“Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.”

“There are two tragedies in life. One is never getting your heart's desire. The other is getting it.”

“If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.”

“In circumstances of real tragedy you see things straight away… past, present, and future together.”

“It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss.”

“So does nobody care about Ireland?"
"Nobody. Neither King Louis, nor King Billie, nor King James." He nodded thoughtfully. "The fate of Ireland will be decided by men not a single one of whom gives a damn about her. That is her tragedy.”

“Great tragedies have great consequences. They ripple through the fabric of this world and the next. When the loss is too great for either world to bear, Everlost absorbs the shock, like a cushion between the two.”

“To me, tragedy is if I'll cut my finger, that's tragedy…Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die.”

“If it can be verified, we don't need faith… Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.”

“There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.”

“I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.”

“Laughter is wine for the soul – laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness. Comedy and tragedy step through life together, arm in arm, all along, out along, down along lea. A laugh is a great natural stimulator, a pushful entry into life; and once we can laugh, we can live. It is the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.”

“When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book.”

“Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.”

“the biggest tragedy of life is the utter impossibility to change what you have done”

“I call upon the American people to affirm with me this American Promise -- that we have learned from the tragedy of that long-ago experience forever to treasure liberty and justice for each individual American, and resolve that this kind of action shall never again be repeated.”

“Being misunderstood by someone is vexation. Being misunderstood by everyone is tragedy.”

“Sometimes you run away by yourself purely so someone who cares will come to find you. Half the time nobody does. That's the tragedy of life.”

“The spectator of a sculpture, modern or ancient, is not called to examine his own or the sculptor's knowledge of anatomy but to participations, so to say, a participation where the motions which have strangulated the carver, while working, must operate the same mysterious attraction and inexpressible miracle of forms and lines, its dramaticism, its graphic tragedy, or its smiling gaiety and happiness: its words carved out of forms and sown with lines into phrases of philosophy, religion.”

“Sometimes insanity is not a tragedy. Sometimes, it's a strategy for survival. Sometimes … it's a triumph.”

“The great tragedy is that they're removing art completely, not because they're putting more science in, but because they can't afford the art teachers or because somebody thinks it's not useful. An enlightened society has all of this going on within it. It's part of what distinguishes what it is to be human from other life forms on Earth — that we have culture.”

“This is a tragedy among human history, the result of large numbers of human errors. But the net of justice is omipresent, it never missed.”

“Why, Sir, when I have anything to invent, I never trouble my head about it, as other men do; but presently turn over this Book, and there I have, at one view, all that Perseus, Montaigne, Seneca's Tragedies, Horace, Juvenal, Claudian, Pliny, Plutarch's lives, and the rest, have ever thought upon this subject: and so, in a trice, by leaving out a few words, or putting in others of my own, the business is done.”

“But when a great artist or a great writer lays hold upon either sort of ugliness he transfigures it instantaneously. With a touch from the magic ring he metamorphoses it into beauty. His Is a sort of fairy alchemy. His Is a sort of fairy alchemy.
When Velasquez, paints Sebastian, King Philip's dwarf, he gives him such an appealing look that we read the poor creature's secret and see the tragedy it involved — a man forced to get his living by discarding his human dignity, and becoming a toy, a living joke. The more poignant his martyrdom, within that misshapen body, the more beautiful the artist's work.
When Millet paints a poor rustic leaning upon a hoe, a wretch broken by fatigue, scorched by the sun, degraded as a beast of the field, he has only to add an expression of resignation in order to make this hideous nightmare a magnificent symbol of humanity.
When Shakespeare gives us Tago or Richard III, and when Racine gives us Néron and Narcisse, moral ugliness, interpreted by minds so clear, so penetrating, becomes a marvelous theme of beauty.”

“The civil war in Syria is the worst humanitarian tragedy of our generation and one that our government, and the world, is failing to deal with adequately.”

“The China Incident [of 1937 onwards] has resulted in massive loss of life through the mutual killing of neighboring friends. This is the greatest tragedy of the last one thousand years. Nevertheless this is a holy war to save the peoples of East Asia…. Invoking the power of Avalokitesvara, I pray for the bright future of East Asia.”

“The Venezuelans ought to become inspired by the Honduran model, and strive for a change of government as soon as possible, through pacific, democratic, and constitutional means--and not just electoral--to avoid a national tragedy.”

“Now a life of leisure and a pirate's treasure
Don't make much for tragedy.
But it's a sad man my friend who's livin' in his own skin
And can't stand the company.
Every fool's got a reason to feelin' sorry for himself
And turn his heart to stone.
Tonight this fool's halfway to heaven and just a mile outta hell,
And I feel like I'm comin' home.”

“In the past the mood of the comic postcard could enter into the central stream of literature, and jokes barely different from McGill's could casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare's tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole category of humour, integral to our literature till 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn postcards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers' windows. The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish.”

“I can remember being young enough, long ago, to believe that in Tennessee Williams the giant themes of Greek tragedy had returned, all hung about with Magnolias. Ignorance of Greek tragedy helped in this view.”

“A friend of mine who passed away some nine years ago was an active member of the NBA. And many of you may remember him, Gil Hardy. [Applause. ] Probably one of the most painful tragedies for me of my confirmation was to see the name of one of the nicest, most decent human beings I had ever met, besmirched. And Gil was my best friend at both college and at Yale Law School. He was the best man at my wedding and he is the person to whom I went for solace.”

“A tragedy can never suffer by delay: a comedy may, because the allusions or the manners represented in it maybe temporary.”

“The holocaust tragedy has been abducted by Israeli strategists, with few Jewish protests, for Israel's ideological acrobatics. As Palestinian recent history has shown, no Palestinian engagement with the holocaust will be satisfactory to Israel and its supporters. Israeli demands that Palestinians recognize the holocaust are not about the holocaust at all, but rather about the other part of the package, namely recognizing and submitting to Israel's "right to exist" as a colonial-settler racist state. The Palestinian authority has given up, but the Palestinian people should continue to resist this Zionist package deal. Their resistance is the only remaining obstacle to a complete Zionist victory, one that seeks to be sealed by Zionism's rewriting of both Palestinian and Jewish histories.”

“Defending slavery deprived the Confederate soldier to the same claim to nobility, but not to tragedy.”

“"I wended my way to the graveyard this evening," wrote Anne to Gilbert after she got home. "I think 'wend your way' is a lovely phrase and I work it in whenever I can. It sounds funny to say I enjoyed my stroll in the graveyard but I really did. Miss Courtaloe's stories were so funny. Comedy and tragedy are so mixed up in life, Gilbert. The only thing that haunts me is that tale of the two who lived together fifty years and hated each other all that time. I can't believe they really did. Somebody has said that 'hate is only love that has missed its way.' I feel sure that under the hatred they really loved each other… just as I really loved you all those years I thought I hated you… and I think death would show it to them."”

“The overriding paradox is that a democratic and vocational resistance to modernity, defined as the joint sovereignty of financial markets and public administration is the most efficient, competitive and sustainable modern position. The tragedy is that such a reasonable political position is unavailable within the mainstream of European politics, indeed there are those who argue that it would be illegal and an infringement of EU rules concerning competition.”

“Almost all of the social tragedies occurring around the world today are caused by ignoring the basic biological laws of nature … The quicker we humans learn that saving open space and wildlife is critical to our welfare and quality of life, maybe we'll start thinking of doing something about it.”

“The lone wolf who knows no peace, these victims of unceasing pain to whom the urge for tragedy has been denied and who can never break through the starry space, who feel themselves summoned thither and yet cannot survive in its atmosphere-for them is reserved, provided suffering has made their spirits rough and elastic enough, a way of reconcilement and an escape into humor. Humor has always something bourgeois in it, although the true bourgeois in capable of understanding it.”

“…The greater the love, the greater the tragedy when it's over. Those two elements always go together. … The best we can hope for in life is that it doesn't happen for a long, long time.”

“The artist's studio will be like a glass-bell or a hollow crystal. The painter himself must be white, which is to say, without tragedy or sorrow. The pallet must be of glass; the brush must be square and hard, dust-free and as immaculate as a surgical instrument. Doubtless there is much to learn from a medical laboratory... The studio of the modern painter must reflect the ambiance of mountains which are nine thousand feet high and topped with a eternal cap of snow. There the cold kills the microbes.”

“Some may wish to argue that Hayek was simply born with a sort of natural pessimism or cynicism, and that this generated his long standing belief in the inherent limitations that humans face when they try to intervene in social phenomena. Perhaps. But it is also possible that this view was the product of his having come of age during the final collapse of an already broken-down empire, of having experienced the multiple forms of disaster that surrounded postwar Vienna and enveloped interwar central Europe, and of having witnessed the failures of various high-minded social experiments to achieve anything like what their exponents had promised. In bearing witness to so much tragedy Hayek was again very much a part of the larger Austrian tradition. His famed ‘‘epistemic pessimism’’ may well have been another result of that larger experience.”

“Okay, time for me to rain on this parade. I didn’t know he had kids. Young kids. This alters the mix considerably. This makes him an asshole. Cops and firemen, to name but two, place their lives on the line every day to protect others. There was nothing Steve Irwin was doing that he could not have done—as did, say, David Attenborough—without putting his life at risk. This takes this from tragedy to stupidity, and, worse, irresponsibility.”

“Bush said, in a big memorial service the other day, we've come to mourn and grieve and try to make some kind of sense out of this senseless tragedy that makes no sense. Well, wrong, President Bush. It makes perfect sense, to those who believe the Bible. [The victims of the massacre] died for America's sins and persecuting Westboro Baptist Church.”

“The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”

“If yesterday marked the five month anniversary of the darkest day in American history, today — the Day After — must mark the anniversary of one of the greatest days in American history: because on September 12, a bruised and battered nation began to fight back. Some fought back by rushing to aid and rescue the few surviving victims of the tragedy — and to aid and comfort the grieving and bereaved.”