Quotes About Tragedy

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.

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.

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.

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.

We all know what tragedy is. "Yes, I'd rather not have any more tragedy, please. I'll have comedy, please." Comedy, in the Greek sense, only means that it has a happy ending.

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.

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

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.

I don't want to make a style. Not tragedy, not comedy. Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together.

Beyond the deepest tragedy there is laughter; even in the midst of tragedy there is always the possibility for laughter.

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.

Tragedy is something that happens to a lot of people - it's a tragedy if you react with handwringing.

Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.

Such exceptional suffering and calamity, then, affecting the hero, and-we must now add-generally extending far and wide beyond him, so as to make the whole scene a scene of woe, are an essential ingredient in tragedy and a chief source of the tragic emotions, and especially of pity. But the proportions of this ingredient, and the direction taken by tragic pity, will naturally vary greatly.

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.

People are born, they have a limited amount of time going around thinking life is dandy but then, inevitably, tragedy strikes and they realize life equals loss! The whole point of the game is to minimize the pain caused by that equation! Now some people do it by having kids, or making money, or taking up coin collecting, and others do it by getting wasted.

Humanity can be divided into madmen and cowards. My personal tragedy is in being born into a world where sanity is held to be a character flaw.

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.

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.

All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.

Ill never forget Hurricane Katrina - the mix of a natural and a man-made catastrophe that resulted in the death of over 1,500 of our neighbors. Millions of folks were marked by the tragedy.

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.

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

Gay icons usually have some tragedy in their lives, but I've only had tragic haircuts and outfits.

In Serbia's case, the unresolved accountability for the Bytyqi brothers massacre needs to be resolved. And we would urge you to give this matter prompt and immediate attention to bring those responsible to justice for this tragedy.

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

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.

And for the authentical truth of either person or actions, who (worth the respecting) will expect it in a poem, whose subject is not truth, but things like truth? Poor envious souls they are that cavil at truth's want in these natural fictions; material instruction, elegant and sententious excitation to virtue, and deflection from her contrary, being the soul, limbs, and limits of an authentical tragedy.

I felt that if a man's proposals met with approval, it should encourage him; if they met with opposition, it should make him fight back; but the real tragedy for him was to lift up his voice among the living and meet with no response neither approval nor opposition just as if he were left helpless in a boundless desert.

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

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

Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.

There is no tragedy in missing a putt, no matter how short. All have erred in this respect.

This is really a twin tragedy both for the people who were misled over there and for those of us who were misled over here.

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.

When you fly across the country in an airplane the country seems vast; but it isn't vast. It's all connected by roads one can ride a bike down. If you watch the news and there's a tragedy at a house in Kansas, that guy's driveway connects with yours, and you'd be surprised by how few roads it takes to get there.

If we lacked imagination enough to foresee something better, life would indeed be a tragedy.

You will not leave the theater with nothing to talk about. For me, comedy and tragedy when you get them both in one evening, that's the most satisfying.

Moral evil is the immorality and pain and suffering and tragedy that come because we choose to be selfish, arrogant, uncaring, hateful and abusive.

My maternal grandmother was in London during the Blitz. Indeed, the man she was dating before she met my grandfather was killed beside her in a cinema, in 1941, when a bomb came through the roof - a tragedy in which she herself was badly wounded.

My protest against digital has been me saying, "What's going to happen to film?" The result is that Kodak is out of business. That's a national tragedy. We've got to keep making film.

There are only three possible endings -aren't there? - to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That's it. All stories end like that.

Ordinary people shy away form negative situations, just as they do with failure. They do their best to avoid trouble. What great people do is the opposite. They are their best in these situations. They turn personal tragedy or misfortune - really anything, everything - to their advantage.

The real tragedy of minimum wage laws is that they are supported by well-meaning groups who want to reduce poverty. But the people who are hurt most by higher minimums are the most poverty stricken.

The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy.

The universal social pressure upon women to be all alike, and do all the same things, and to be content with identical restrictions, has resulted not only in terrible suffering in the lives of exceptional women, but also in the loss of unmeasured feminine values in special gifts. The Drama of the Woman of Genius has too often been a tragedy of misshapen and perverted power.

The principle tragedy of my life is, like all tragedies, an irony of Destiny. I reject real life as if it were a condemnation; I reject dreams as if they were an ignoble liberation. [...]After the end of the stars uselessly whitened in the morning sky and the breeze became less cold in the barely orange tinged in the yellow of the light on the scattered low clouds, I, who hadn't slept, could finally, slowly raise my body, exhausted from nothing from the bed from which I had thought the universe.