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.

Death is not the greatest tragedy in life. The greatest tragedy is what dies inside us while we live. We need not fear death. We need fear only that we may exist without having sensed something of the possibilities that lie within human existence.

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.

Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil. . . Hysterical optimism as a sin against knowledge.

Tragedy is one of the larger prices we pay for being alive. No one ever sidesteps tragedy. It is always there, shadowing us.

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.

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.

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.

I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure--the web--of society needed reform,not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.

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.

I think that everything looks a little scarier at night, when the sun goes down. And I know I kind of want a sense of reassurance or a community. Late-night shows is a rare place because that's what we do. Increasingly, I felt like I didn't want to be that guy. I didn't want to do that. It wasn't the only reason that I stopped doing it, but it was a consideration - I didn't know how to process tragedy after tragedy and then ... it just got too much, I think.

In writing a little tragedy, 'The Gaol Gate,' I made the scenario in three lines, 'He is an informer; he is dead; he is hanged.' I wrote that play very quickly.

Commander I believe in God and his son Jesus Christ and because I do I can say this. Private Santiago is dead and that is a tragedy. But he is dead because he had no code. He is dead because he had no honor. And God was watching.

We find that Good and Evil happen alike to all Men on this Side of the Grave; and as the principle Design of Tragedy is to raise Commiseration and Terror in the Minds of the Audience, we shall defeat this great End, if we always make Virtue and Innocence happy and successful.

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

To lose one parent is a tragedy, to lose both is utter carelessness.

Autumn is an honest month; it does not delude man like spring does! It shows him the dark face of life, the tragedy, the rot, the separation, the sadness!

My book 'Trust Your Heart', which is the story of my life, will be followed by 'Singing Lessons', a memoir of love, loss, hope, and healing, which talks about the death of my son and the hope that has been the aftermath of the healing from that tragedy.

The Holocaust is the most documented tragedy in recorded history. And therefore, later on, if there will be a later on, anyone wishing to know will know where to go for knowledge.

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.

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

I think that sometimes almost the bigger tragedy in a weird way is all of the future imagined creative projects that could have happened that didn't. I feel the same way about lots of brilliant people who die young, kind of senselessly especially.

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

Tibet's a tragedy. It's an insult to human decency.

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.

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.

One can play comedy, two are required for melodrama, but a tragedy demands three.

But I find with Francis Bacon, some of the things were in the place, and someone who was connected with these schools of thought, and someone who had a motivation that equals the scope of the comedy and the tragedy in the plays.

A life without tragedy would not be worth living.

Most of my life has been one tragedy after another, most of which hasn't happened.

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

Unsaintly saints are the tragedy of Christianity.

Tragedy makes you grow up.

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

Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man's recognition of hisown negative potential--with his sense of what he is capable of.

It's a terrible thing wishing that it can be someone else's tragedy.

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

If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.

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

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.

When you reflect on Sept. 11 and the tragedy of that day, one of the things that came out of that was the goodness of humanity

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

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.

Tragedy brings us closer to ourselves - it's the only thing that does.

Preparation through education is less costly than learning through tragedy.

I may know I am better than an 18, but the computer absorbs my scores year after year and continues to tell me that is what I am. Therein lies the tragedy of golf. We know what we should be, but there is always some number telling us what it is.