Quotes About Tragedy

Comedy is an intellectual affair, and deals chiefly with logic. Tragedy is an emotional affair, and deals chiefly with value. Horace Walpole once said that "life is a comedy to the man who thinks and a tragedy to the man who feels." Comedy is negative; it is a criticism of limitations and an unwillingness to accept them. Tragedy is positive; it is an uncritical acceptance of the positive content of that which is delimited. Since comedy deals with the limitations of actual situations and tragedy with their positive content, comedy must ridicule and tragedy must endorse.

I naturally think in terms of comedy whenever I see anything because tragedy is so close to comedy, so I like to add the tragedy to the comedy or a little bit of comedy to the tragedy in order to make them both feel more real to me.

I wish i could tell you that through the tragedy i mined some undiscovered, life-altering absolute that i could pass on to you.I didn't.The cliches apply-people are what count,life is precious,materialism is over rated, and the little things matter,live in the moment-and i can repeat them to you ad nauseam.you might listen, but you won't internalize.Tragedy hammers it hm.Tragedy etches into your soul.You might not be happier.But you will be better.

There's so much tragedy in people that we see every day that we don't have to make anything up. We don't have to invent anything. There are two items on the menu: comedy and tragedy.

Everyday, day & night, we hear the lies that September 11th is the worst tragedy, worst accident, and worst crime to ever been committed on American soil. We bear witness that the worst crime, the worst tragedy, that has ever taken place on American soil is not September 11th. It's not the twin towers. It's the holocaust that black folks been dealing with for 400 years.

The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.

How can we help students to understand that the tragedy of life is not death; the tragedy is to die with commitments undefined and convictions undeclared and service unfulfilled?

The tragedy of all of this is that it happened to me and it shouldn't have happened. It ruined my life and my career. That's the tragedy of this.

Beyond the deepest tragedy there is laughter; even in the midst of tragedy there is always the possibility for laughter.

Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike. Our experience with the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our experience with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages.

Ive never thought of my characters as being sad. On the contrary, they are full of life. They didnt choose tragedy. Tragedy chose them.

When tragedy strikes, no one is fully prepared to deal effectively with all the responsibilitie s, emotional trauma, and grief that begin to impact people. Our Rapid Response Team exists so that people can find the care and comfort of Jesus Christ in the midst of tragedy.

Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease, and all the agonies of the soul, but for all time his tormenting tragedy is, and will be, the tragedy of the bedroom.

Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

Hopefully we can come together without tragedy making us do this. Because ultimately underneath it all, at the risk of sounding cliché, we have so much more in common than we do different. When someone loves someone we should celebrate that and be happy for the people in love. That's the goal. We're all here because we want to be loved and love someone else.

David Brinkley was an icon of modern broadcast journalism, a brilliant writer who could say in a few words what the country needed to hear during times of crisis, tragedy and triumph.

America's gun culture demonstrates itself in the Wild West, Dirty Harry mentality of people who actually believe that if a number of people were armed in the theater in Aurora, they would have been able to take down this nutjob in body armor and military style artillery. When in fact almost every policeman in the country would tell you that that would have only increased the tragedy and added to the carnage.

The twentieth century saw a professionalization of fiction writing, particularly in its second half and particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world - not so much mainland Europe, for example. This professionalization is a tragedy. Hand in hand with this - and I have no idea what the causal relations are - there has been a rise in the idea of The Author, so that today one often has the impression that what's selling the book is not the book but the author.

We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed. For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one's predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change a situation-just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer-we are challenged to change ourselves.

One could say the higher the spirit goes, the more deeply the soul sinks down into the waters of melancholy and tragedy. Drowning in that water is as sweet as rising.

There are stories that are true, in which each individual's tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it to deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others' pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.

Of one thing I am sure. Complaining is self-perpetuating and counterproductive. Whenever I express my complaints in the hope of evoking pity and receiving the satisfaction I so much desire, the result is always the opposite of what I tried to get. A complainer is hard to live with, and very few people know how to respond to the complaints made by a self-rejecting person. The tragedy is that, often, the complaint, once expressed, leads to that which is most feared: further rejection.

A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude. A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.

Tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer.

The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. The Tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack fire and conviction, while those who believe in dishonesty are full of passionate conviction.

Ill never forget Hurricane Katrina - the mix of a natural and a man-made catastrophe that resulted in the death of over 1,500 of our neighbors. Millions of folks were marked by the tragedy.

It's amazing when tragedy strikes, how strong you find that you are, and I'd seen other people go through horrible things. And I just thought, "Wow, I would be a complete mess," and then suddenly when it happens, you realize you had more strength than you knew and it helps you to get through.

Neither our own passing nor the passing of an era is a tragedy, no matter how much we would like to think it is.

The building is a national tragedy - a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.

The greatest tragedy in life is not to die, it is to live as if dead, to let the life within us wither. Toward what goal or achievement are we striving in life? This is the important question to ask ourselves.

I have witnessed firsthand the anguish of this humanitarian tragedy - in Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and other conflict and post-conflict zones. The destruction of lives and hopes, the emotional trauma, and the economic, social, and political marginalization of the displaced, the human insecurity, with real and potentially devastating consequences over generations, in ever-widening arenas of conflict. We can and must ensure the human rights of the displaced. That begins by making their voices heard.

Patricia Smith is one of the best poets around and has been for a long time. Her Blood Dazzler is full of capacious soul and formal inventiveness: the compassion and artfulness necessary to capture the tragedies and Tragedy of Katrina. Smith is herself a storm of beautiful, frightening talent. Her words will wash you or wash you away. I consider this new book a major literary event.

Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?

Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens.

Writers of comedy have outlook, whereas writers of tragedy have, according to them, insight.

Let us see as steadily and completely as possible the realities of our age: the wasted lives, the scattered and misused resources (human and material), the steel magic of the misdirected machinery, the mad clockwork tragedy of it all.

I believe that the tragedy [like terror attack] that's caused so much grief and suffering to so many thousands and thousands of people has also served as a call to action, because many people now are re-examining their own value systems, and the churches, temples, mosques and cathedrals are packed to overflowing for the first time in years.

There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle promise from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.

Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it.

It would behoove the world to become used to this fact: that without a just solution to the Palestine tragedy, there can be no stable peace in the Middle East.

City government can and must help San Franciscans prepare for emergencies in order to avoid tragedy where possible and minimize loss of life and property when emergencies occur

If you don’t learn how to cry, you cannot be a good Christian. When they posed this question to us – why children suffer, why this or that tragedy occurs in life – our response must be either silence or a word that is born of our tears. Be courageous, don’t be afraid to cry.

The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand, we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation: whence arises the danger that man may bleed to death through the truth that he realises.

September 11 was, and remains, above all an immense human tragedy. But September 11 also posed a momentous and deliberate challenge not just to America but to the world at large. The target of the terrorists was not only New York and Washington but the very values of freedom, tolerance and decency which underpin our way of life.

My protest against digital has been me saying, "What's going to happen to film?" The result is that Kodak is out of business. That's a national tragedy. We've got to keep making film.

Comedy is tragedy plus time.

There is only one real tragedy in a woman's life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.

The great challenge is to refuse to let the bad things that happen to us do bad things to us. That is the crucial difference between adversity and tragedy.