Quotes About Tragedy

I have been asked whether I would agree that the tragedy of the scientist is that he is able to bring about great advances in our knowledge, which mankind may then proceed to use for purposes of destruction. My answer is that this is not the tragedy of the scientist; it is the tragedy of mankind.

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.

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.

It is always a great honour to mention a truth which has not become widespread yet. One of these truths is that man has no soul; he has only 'body' and 'mind'. Man's unshakable belief on the soul will not change this scientific truth! No belief can be higher than the scientific truths! Man can be born, can walk and work and can think without owning a mysterious and an immaterial soul! The soullessness of the man is a great tragedy both for the man and for the religion. But Man, contrary to the religion, will come out with triumph from this tragedy.

The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that things are not mended again.

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.

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.

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.

Here's one truth that perhaps your typical investment counselor would disagree with: if you're comfortably rich and someone else is getting richer faster than you by, for example, investing in risky stocks, so what?! Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is not a tragedy.

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.

The twentieth century saw a professionalization of fiction writing, particularly in its second half and particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world - not so much mainland Europe, for example. This professionalization is a tragedy. Hand in hand with this - and I have no idea what the causal relations are - there has been a rise in the idea of The Author, so that today one often has the impression that what's selling the book is not the book but the author.

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.

Suicide is not a blot on anyone’s name; it is a tragedy

A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude. A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.

This familiarity with a respected physician and my appreciation of his work, or the tragedy I experienced with the long, tormented agony and death of my mother might have influenced me in wanting to study medicine. It was not the case.

Mann is widely recognized as a master of irony and ambiguity, yet it's remarkable how quickly people foreclose options he carefully leaves open. Lots of readers - including eminent critics - jump to conclusions: that Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy is a central background text, that Aschenbach is an inferior writer, that he's never been attracted by pubescent male beauty before, that he dies of cholera.

That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.

I've only made short films and two features, which are very different. One is a surreal comedy, and the other is a period tragedy. I'm curious to know what misconceptions this could trigger

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.

I can't imagine anything that would signal more clearly that life goes on and joy can follow tragedy than your having a much wanted child.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

Nuclear weapons will not be gotten rid of until the United States confronts the magnitude of the horror, the tragedy, and the long-term suffering of the victims

The greatest tragedy in life is the prayers that go unanswered simply because they go unasked.

It’s easier to be a character in a story than the star of your own tragedy.

The building is a national tragedy - a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.

Violence against women is not random or anonymous. In West Virginia, 88 percent of sexual-assault victims already know their attacker. In my hometown, Alicia McCormick, an advocate for our domestic-violence shelter at the YWCA, was killed in her home by a man doing handiwork in her apartment complex. That one of my greatest advocates could fall victim to something she fought against her whole life was a tragedy that moved me to action.

Once I became historically aware, I realized there are these formative moments of history tied around tragedy and disaster and sacrifice, that led people to survive and take stock and move on with some kind of notion of betterment.

Faith in God offers no insurance against tragedy.

In tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is a moment.

Patricia Smith is one of the best poets around and has been for a long time. Her Blood Dazzler is full of capacious soul and formal inventiveness: the compassion and artfulness necessary to capture the tragedies and Tragedy of Katrina. Smith is herself a storm of beautiful, frightening talent. Her words will wash you or wash you away. I consider this new book a major literary event.

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 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.

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

My life was typical. I played a little Little League baseball. I never wanted for food. I always had shoes. I had a room. There were no great tragedies. There were the typical ups and downs but I wouldn' t say it was at all sad. We were Jewish and living in the suburbs so there was a slightly neurotic bent to it, but I can't point to anything where a boy overcame a tragedy to become a comedian. As my grandmother used to say, 'I can't complain.

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

To drown a river beneath its own impounded water, by damming, is to kill what it was and to settle for something else. When the damming happens without good reason . . . then it's a tragedy of diminishment for the whole planet, a loss of one more wild thing, leaving Earth just a little flatter and tamer and simpler and uglier than before.

The calamities of tragedy do not simply happen, nor are they sent; they proceed mainly from actions, and those the actions of men.We see a number of human beings placed in certain circumstances; and we see, arising from the co-operation of their characters in these circumstances, certain actions. These actions beget others, and these others beget others again, until this series of inter-connected deeds leads by an apparently inevitable sequence to a catastrophe.

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.

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.

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

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.

Woodrow Wilson administration ended in tragedy, with his insistence on governing following his disabling stroke. I suspect President Wilson is often graded on a special curve, because many academic historians identify with him as one of their own.

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.

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