Quotes About Tragedy

I have changed my definition of tragedy. I now think tragedy is not foul deeds done to a person (usually noble in some manner) but rather that tragedy is irresolvable conflict.

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.

Tragedy isn't an easy thing to kill. It takes more than a turtle. Tragedy must be destroyed by someone willing to be swallowed by it, willing to be broken, torn out of the flesh, but able to return to it. Someone must be able to shatter the tragic from within and exit into comedy, able to rip a hole so wide that a train of souls, a parade, could follow after, banging drums and throwing candy as they strolled into the sun.

Marriage -- yes, it is the supreme felicity of life. I concede it. And it is also the supreme tragedy of life. The deeper the love the surer the tragedy. And the more disconsolating when it comes.

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.

The lurking tragedy: The chances are that an accident will some day happen to you at a friend's dinner table ... As long as water and coffee and jelly exist, a certain percentage of each will necessarily be overturned upon a like number of snowy white tablecloths. Usually the tragedy is really no one's fault.

It's remarkable - most remarkable, the way these people manage, from time to time, a tragedy or a near-tragedy to break the even tenor of their ways,' said Mr. Tingley, in a tone of half-humorous superiority, by which he considered that he distinguished himself, subtly and inoffensively, from 'these people.

The tragedy of "Hamlet" is critically considered to be the masterpiece of dramatic poetry; and the tragedy of "Hamlet" is also, according to the testimony of every sort of manager, the play of all others which can invariably be depended on to fill a theater.

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.

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.

Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up... a lot of people don't have the courage to do it.

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.

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.

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.

Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the 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.

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

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.

It was in Spain that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.

Life's greatest tragedy is not that it will someday end, but that most only live to follow directions and sometimes we end up totally lost.

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.

To choose a writer for a friend is like palling around with your cardiologist, who might be musing as you talk to him that you are a sinking man. A writer's love for another writer is never quite free of malice. He may enjoy discussing your failures even more than you do. He probably sees you as tragic, like his characters - or unworthy of tragedy, which is worse.

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

This is the real tragedy of America's 'Internet freedom agenda': It's going to be the dissidents in China and Iran who will pay for the hypocrisy that drove it from the very beginning.

The trouble with the lower classes is that they lack the sense of tragedy given to them by the upper classes.

I think you can teach people a technique - you can teach them how to use their voices, how to breathe properly, how to move their limbs a certain way. But to actually explain how one performs comedy or drama or tragedy isn't the same as the movements one makes.

When I step back from any moment of crisis that I've ever had, I'm always struck by how humor and tragedy can kind of live in the same moment, holding hands together. How life can go from the ridiculous to the sublime to the tragic all in one breath.

I hope that people will come and experience our play 'A Small Oak Tree Runs Red' . I don't want anybody to suffer, but I source the 18th Century philosopher David Hume in association with the experience. He asserted that when we go to a tragic play, and when the form of tragedy is well put together, then we can experience a catharsis that is soul cleansing, and an anodyne to what our life would be like without it.

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.

There is no question that if one were to ask whether we Americans are moving towards more liberty or more government control over our lives, the answer would unambiguously be the latter - more government control over our lives. We might have reached a point where the trend is irreversible and that is a true tragedy for if liberty is lost in America, it will be lost for all times and all places.

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

We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it - the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.

Phury knelt beside him and stroked his face. "I've only ever had you to live for. If you die I have nothing. I'm utterly lost. And you are needed here." Zsadist tried to reach out, but couldn't lift his arms as Phury stood up. "God, Z, I keep thinking this tragedy of ours is going to be over. But it just keeps going, doesn't it?" Zsadist blacked out to the sound of his twin's boots heading from the room.

It is one of life's laws that as soon as one door closes another opens. But the tragedy is we look at the closed door and disregard the open one.

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.

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

Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday. Tragedy isn't getting something or failure to get it; it's losing something you already have. Waste not fresh tears over old griefs.

I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.

People say that this new generation is so used to the Internet that their heads are already different. They can't read a book from beginning to end. That is not a tragedy. The book changes form.

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.

It [9/11 tragedy] was the spectacle, what al-Qaeda gets its main power from - why their terrorism truly earns the word "acts." They are very theatrical, always - the simultaneous violence, the grandiose, symbolic gestures (the number 911, "United" and "American" flights, the World Trade as target etc). And then its aftermath.

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.

It made me have a much greater understanding of loss, of loneliness, and the level of intense tragedy that so many people have experienced in this world, I take a lot less for granted.

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

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

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