Quotes About Tragedy

What I'm interested in is happiness with a full awareness of the tragedy of life, the potential tragedy that lurks around every corner and the tragedy that actually is life.

Hope? Hope is not the absence of tragedy, my friend. It is the conviction that tragedy can be endured. Hope is the spark in you that is not subdued in the face of the vast and callous indifference of the universe. Hope is that which is not shattered by hardship. Hope is the urge to fight what is wrong even when you know it will destroy you. Hope is the decision to love and need someone knowing that they will one day die. For me to promise that there are no obstacles would be the cruelest lie I could possibly tell. That lie is not hope. Hope is the will which needs no lies.

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

I just think what we ought to do is we ought to stop seizing one moments of tragedy. We ought to assure the public that we'll have a full and complete and transparent investigation whenever there's a loss of life because of police action. But, you know, enough of this seeking every opportunity to demean law enforcement broadly by making the accusation of implicit bias every time tragedy occurs.

There is a warning. The path of God-exalting joy will cost you your life. Jesus said, “Whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” In other words, it is better to lose your life than to waste it. If you live gladly to make others glad in God, your life will be hard, your risks will be high, and your joy will be full. This is not a book about how to avoid a wounded life, but how to avoid a wasted life. Some of you will die in the service of Christ. That will not be a tragedy. Treasuring life above Christ is a tragedy.

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.

Humor is not funny. Humor is something else. Funny is a joke, sometimes silly. Comedy is deep and connected to tragedy; comedy could be deeper than tragedy, in my view.

Divorce isn't such a tragedy. A tragedy's staying in an unhappy marriage, teaching your children the wrong things about love. Nobody ever died of divorce.

The thing is to be happy, no matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It's nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn't believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, you're just there, going along easy in the world.

As Karl Marx once noted: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationists and intelligent design theorists are a farce.

Artists react to tragedy by doing something both as a way for us as artists to process our pain and our grief and our loss and as a way to give something back and memorialize people that are lost. That always makes it far harder to compartmentalize things. As a species, should never get used to tragedy and we should do everything we can to prevent it from happening and to celebrate people loving people. We should all be lucky enough to be loved and to love someone in return. That's what this is about.

We're all hoping that Trump doesn't get our world on his terms because there won't be anything of it left. Trump is a true psychopath, a psychopath in the way that tragedy becomes tragedy.

The tragedy is not so much the experience that you're having. The tragedy is that we don't take the time to understand the meaning and purpose behind what we're going through.

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.

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

William Shakespeare was the most remarkable storyteller that the world has ever known. Homer told of adventure and men at war, Sophocles and Tolstoy told of tragedies and of people in trouble. Terence and Mark Twain told cosmic stories, Dickens told melodramatic ones, Plutarch told histories and Hans Christian Andersen told fairy tales. But Shakespeare told every kind of story – comedy, tragedy, history, melodrama, adventure, love stories and fairy tales – and each of them so well that they have become immortal. In all the world of storytelling he has become the greatest name.

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.

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

So, the great test of life is to see whether we will hearken to and obey God's commands in the midst of the storms of life. It is not to endure storms, but to choose the right while they rage. And the tragedy of life is to fail in that test and so fail to qualify to return in glory to our heavenly home.

I perform regularly with a theater company called Outside the Wire who take performances of Greek tragedy to American-military audiences around the world to create discussion about PTSD and soldier suicide. It's one of the greatest things I've ever been asked to do as an actor.

Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.

I hate England and its hopelessness. I hate [Arnold] Bennett's resignation. Tragedy ought really to be a great big kick at misery.

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.

What to us may seem like a tragedy when it happens eventually can form itself into a gift.

The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness of a sick room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy, because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.

Comedy is merely tragedy happening to someone else.

The Palestinians have no other land. They are absolutely right about this. The Israeli Jews also have no other land and they are absolutely right about this. It is a tragedy of two peoples claiming the same very small country - very small, about the size of New Jersey. And both of them are right. Both of them have no other homeland as peoples. As individuals, maybe, but not as a people.

The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.

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

Is there anyone’s life story you don’t want to know?” “Not really.” His expression was unexpectedly serious. “Because people make a story of their lives. Gains, losses, tragedy and triumph—you can tell a lot about someone simply by what they put into each category. You can learn a lot about what you put into each category by your reaction to them. They teach you about yourself without ever intending to do it—and they teach you a lot about life.

Europe is standing on the brink of the greatest tragedy in the history of the human race: a new world war, that may involve the doom of our entire civilisation.

Worries typically follow such lines, a narrative to oneself that jumps from concern to concern and more often than not includes catastrophizing, imagining some terrible tragedy. Worries are almost always expressed in the mind's ear, not its eye - that is, in words, not images - a fact that has significance for controlling worry.

The human attitude of which classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over blind change. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful serenity.

The tragedy of journalism is that these are people doing their best work.

You'll say I'm self-destructive I constructed all this tragedy. Go tell them all it's all my fault You'll tell them I was crazy . And anyway it's over now Nothing left to say.

Life is a tragedy filled with suffering and despair and yet some people do manage to avoid jury duty.

The ‘I’ character in journalism is almost pure invention. Unlike the ‘I’ of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of the writer, the ‘I’ of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way—the way, say, that Superman is connected to Clark Kent. The journalistic ‘I’ is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life.

For me, a desert island is no tragedy, neither is a deserted planet.

Humans are born, small, weak and helpless. That's why we have family. And the elders of the family are the honoured guardians of our country's history. Unfortunately, in America, we, you know, lock those elders away out of view in nursing homes and go about our little lives. It's a great national shame and an irredeemable tragedy. Oh well.

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

The real tragedy is that we're all human beings, and human beings have a sense of dignity. Any domination by one human over another leads to a loss of some part of his dignity. Is one's dignity that big it can be crumbled away like that?

I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I've spent fifteen years being treated for nothing other than looking different from everyone else. It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison.

And I'm dying to know, is it killing you like it's killing me? And the story of us looks a lot like a tragedy now.

Wouldn't it be a tragedy to get to the top of the ladder and find you placed it against the wrong wall?

Donald Trump will be a tragedy, a sad joke in American history.

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.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again.