Quotes About Tragedy

What is a defeat? It is just a good opportunity to make a new start, nothing else! Defeat is by no means a tragedy, but to consider it as a tragedy is in fact the greatest tragedy! In your every defeat, you must know that the paths of the victory never disappear; try those roads again!

Tragedy massages the human ego even as comedy deflates it. ... Tragedy pits us against large foes and the trip wire is our own character. ... In comedy we fall afoul of one another. Comedy depends on social life, on our behavior in groups. In tragedy you can observe one human against the gods. In comedy it's one human versus other humans and often one man (or woman if I'm writing it) against her own worst impulses.

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.

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

Men of success meet with tragedy. It was the will of God that I won the Olympics, and it was the will of God that I met with my accident. I accepted those victories as I accept this tragedy. I have to accept both circumstances as facts of life and live happily.

There is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck in review after review, and in many conversations with writers and readers alike. It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism.

You can picture pretty easily if there were a paying passenger aboard a rocket that failed, like Challenger failed. Certainly it would be a tragedy, and a tragedy for the company. They would have a hard time recovering from it.

I felt I was drawing close to that age, that place in life, where you realize one day what you'd told yourself was a Zen detachment turns out to be naked fear. You'd had one serious love relationship in your life and it had ended in tragedy, and the tragedy had broken something inside you. But instead of trying to repair the broken place, or at least really stop and look at it, you skated and joked. You had friends, you were a decent citizen. You hurt no one. And your life was somehow just about half of what it could be.

Human life is a combination of tragedy and comedy. The shapes and designs that surround us are the music accompanying this tragedy and this comedy.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

Tragedy enlightens - and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man's freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies.

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

The tragedy of life and of the world is not that men do not know God; the tragedy is that, knowing Him, they still insist on going their own way.

It's all a terrible tragedy. And yet, in it's details, it's great fun. And - apart from the tragedy - I've never felt happier or better in my life than in those days in Belgium.

Can one be fully human without experiencing tragedy? The only tragedy there is in the world is ignorance; all evil comes from that.

Life is a tragedy, one way or another. What is certain is that you die.

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.

If we had a terrorist attack, the way the people respond is going to determine whether that attack is just a tragedy or whether that attack becomes an all-out disaster.

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

Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.

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

Undoubtedly the war with Iraq was a tragedy. I think it was also a crime.

The nature of tragedy and accident is that we cannot predict.

It is a tragedy that religion for us means, today, nothing more than restrictions on food and drink, nothing more than adherence to absence of superiority and inferiority.

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.

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.

I'm connected to the event of 9/11 by my desire to do something to honor the 9/11 survivors and those who didn't survive. Something that moves our society forward, something that engages children in what it means to be a citizen and encourages them to love and be inclusive. Because if we don't live our lives well - if I don't live my life well - it's an affront to all the people who were involved in the tragedy of 9/11.

Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.

The suffering of a soul that can suffer greatly -- that and only that, is tragedy.

I believe every abortion is a tragedy.

I could croak with no warning, and the only tragedy anyone would experience would be showing up on the last day of my estate sale simply to discover that all remaining items had copious amounts of dog hair on them.

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

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

The very secret of life for mewas to maintain in the midst of rushing events an inner tranquility. I had picked a life that dealt with excitement, tragedy, mass calamities, human triumphs and suffering. To throw my whole self into recording and attempting to understand these things, I needed an inner serenity as a kind of balance.

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

The first time I can remember being on a stage in front of an audience was one that came with triumph, adrenaline and a childlike tragedy. The first time I was on a stage, it wasn't even a music concert. It was a magic show. That being said, the life I lead now isn't what you would call 'destiny'.

History is moving, and it will tend toward hope, or tend toward tragedy.

The tragedy is that in the name of resisting the internal deterioration of faith and the corruption of the world around them, many Christians - and Christian conservatives most significantly -unwittingly embrace some of the most corrosive aspects of the cultural disintegration they decry. By nurturing its resentments, sustaining them through a discourse of negation toward outsiders, and in cases, pursuing their will to power, they become functional Nietzscheans, participating in the very cultural breakdown they so ardently strive resist.

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.

Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.

In olden times when there was a war, it was a human-to-human confrontation. The victor in battle would directly see the blood and suffering of the defeated enemy. Nowadays, it is much more terrifying because a person in an office can push a button and kill millions of people and never see the human tragedy that he or she has created. The mechanization of war, the mechanization of human conflict, poses an increasing threat to peace.

It's true that a human being cannot control what happens to him. However, what we can control is how we respond to what happens to us, what we do with what happens to us. Even if the range of choice is minimal, there is always a choice. From that point of view, destiny is our battlefield. It's not a tragedy; it is what we do with it.

I'm drawn to a lot of tragedies, and I love a Greek tragedy.But I would think - I start thinking realistically about it, and performing eight days a week, that would take a toll. I take things to heart. I don't know if I could survive, like, "Medea."

Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery.

The agrarian crisis [in India] is an unnecessary tragedy, resulting directly from an economics of greed and a politics driven by the economies of greed.

Desire and loss of will tend to hurt the mind, which can lead to fear and compulsion. The result is that we suppress negative emotions, which we've been taught to be shameful of and hide, such as pain, anger, sorrow, and resentment. I take these complex and varied emotions surrounded by obscurity, absurdity, contradiction, and events out of our control such as tragedy, and project them in my work. So I understand that the images can generate fear, confusion, and anxiety in the audience, and if they're difficult to turn away from, it only means that my intention has been communicated.

In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy, really, and loss.

You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.