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.

For me the Holocaust was not only a Jewish tragedy, but also a human tragedy. After the war, when I saw that the Jews were talking only about the tragedy of six million Jews, I sent letters to Jewish organizations asking them to talk also about the millions of others who were persecuted with us together - many of them only because they helped Jews.

Well, for me, it's the relationship between comedy and life - that's the edge I live on, and maybe it's my protection against looking at the tragedy of it all. It's seeing life in balance. Comedy and tragedy co-exist. You can't have one without the other. I'm of the school that anything can be funny, if seen from a comedic point of view.

Classical tragedy was the war between good and evil. We wanted evil to be defeated and good to be victorious. But the battle in modern tragedy is between good and good. And no matter which side wins, we'll still be heartbroken.

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.

A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh.

It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.

Marseilles isn't a city for tourists. There's nothing to see. Its beauty can't be photographed. It can only be shared. It's a place where you have to take sides, be passionately for or against. Only then can you see what there is to see. And you realize, too late, that you're in the middle of a tragedy. An ancient tragedy in which the hero is death. In Marseilles, even to lose you have to know how to fight.

Either over neither, both over either/or, live-and-let-live over stand-or die, high spirits over low, energy over apathy, wit over dullness, jokes over homilies, good humor over jokes, good nature over bad, feeling over sentiment, truth over poetry, consciousness over explanations, tragedy over pathos, comedy over tragedy, entertainment over art, private over public, generosity over meanness, charity over murder, love over charity, irreplaceable over interchangeable, divergence over concurrence, principle over interest, people over principle.

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.

Man generally is entangled in insoluble problems; history is consequently a tragedy in which we are all involved, whose keynote is anxiety and frustration, not progress and fulfilment.

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.

A senseless tragedy remains forever tragic, but it is up to us whether it remains forever senseless.

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.

Though Stalinism may have been a needless tragedy for both the Russian people and communism as an ideal, there is the intellectually tantalizing possibility that for the world at large it was, as we shall see, a blessing in disguise.

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.

None of us has ever seen a motive. Therefore, we don't know we can't do anything more than suspect what inspires the action of another. For this good and valid reason, we're told not to judge. Tragedy is that our attention centers on what people are not, rather than on what they are and who they might become.

Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.

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.

That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.

There are three sayings I live by, and one of them is 'The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.' That's what losing a job is like. That's why we have to bring them back.

Every failure can be considered as a tragedy or a chance to learn something. The latter is healthier

I don't think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it's raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a really good escape from the intolerable, and a good place to go when things are bad, but that doesn't mean you have to write directly about the bad thing; sometimes you need to let time pass, and allow the thing that hurts to get covered with layers, and then you take it out, like a pearl, and you make art out of it.

Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the news, the stock-exchange reports, and the weather forecast are about the only things spared.

Look at Mann's reading habits, his explicit comments on Nietzsche, and his copy of Birth of Tragedy, and it starts to seem doubtful that this work of Nietzsche's played much role in the gestation of the novella.

Samurai films, like westerns, need not be familiar genre stories. They can expand to contain stories of ethical challenges and human tragedy.

You and I were created for joy, and if we miss it we miss the reason for our existence. If our joy is honest joy, it must somehow be congruous with human tragedy. This is the test of joy's integrity. It is compatible with pain. Only the heart that hurts has a right to joy.

We have been counseled to "seek . . . out of the best books words of wisdom." It is pointed out in Proverbs, "Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom." (Proverbs 4:7.) But in getting wisdom and getting knowledge, above all we should "get understanding." It is important to learn a profession, learn a trade. That applies not only to the young men, but it applies to you young women as well. You girls should place yourselves in a position to be self-supporting and independent in the event that tragedy or an emergency comes, for emergencies have come and will continue to come.

I think American drama is at its best when it takes the domestic and makes it epic, like a Greek tragedy in the front room.

I believe every abortion is a tragedy.

Laughter is very young, whereas tragedy, except the very highest of all, quickly becomes haggard.

Only when we fix our gaze on the heavenly things do we begin to understand the eternities. Only with the help of Christ can we fully overcome tragedy. It is necessary to develop our faith in Him as the Redeemer of the world. He taught us: “In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.

People think it's a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer's. But in my mother's case, it's different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. For the first time in her life, she's happy.

The greatest tragedy that can befall a man is never to know who he really is.

I'm not making fun of it because I want to make fun of it. I'm making fun of it so I feel better. I don't want people to think any time there's a tragedy that I'm going to make a joke about it. It's only funny to me because it's personal to me. And that was always the goal. It wasn't to be this insult person.

The greatest tragedy in life is people who have sight but no vision.

There is something disorderly about the death of a young person. In a universe disturbed by so much over which we have no control, an untimely tragedy rattles the teeth of our already shaken confidence. We want to domesticate death, fight it on our own turf, in familiar rooms with shades drawn evenly, top sheets turned back, and a circle of hushed voices closing in.

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.

Our government has become too responsive to trivial or ephemeral concerns, often at the expense of more important concerns or an erosion of our liberty, and it has made policy priorities more dependent on where TV journalists happen to point their cameras. . . . As a nation we have lost our sense of tragedy, a recognition that bad things happen to good people. A nation that expects the government to prevent churches from burning, to control the price of bread or gasoline, to secure every job, and to find some villain for every dramatic accident, risks an even larger loss of life and liberty.

When the news you don't want to hear is looming before you like Everest, two things can happen. Tragedy can run you through like a sword, or it can become your backbone. Either you fall apart and sob, or you say, 'Right. What's next?

Life is not a tragedy, it is a comedy. To be alive means to have a sense of humor.

The tragedy of human history is decreasing happiness in the midst of increasing comforts.

I have long suspected that the power of speech is not a power at all, but a mere form of hysteria from which the living that really know the truth never suffer because they do not fear life or death as we do and can afford to be calm and silent. The frailest flower that blooms knows that it will rise from the dead in the next season's sun, breathe, feel again the dew and rain. Therefore these little ones make no such tragedy as we do of death.

The eyes sparked a lot of things for me, it could be somebody remembering something they had witnessed or heard about, or it could be the person in the photograph that was experiencing a tragedy or it could also be the spectator looking on from a safe distance.

Making this movie as a period piece about a period that was very recent in people's minds. I was in Taiwan [during the 1970s], so I hope I did all right. Otherwise, it could be the biggest embarrassment of my life. Also, the story is not linear, it's patchy, like a cubist painting, and there is always the possibility it will not hold together, it will fall apart. The tone is part satire, part serious drama, part tragedy, all mixed together, and it has to hit an emotional core. That's also very scary.

Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting.