Great Tragedies Quotes

#1. There are two great tragedies in life: one is to fail to achieve one's grandest ambitions, and the other one is to succeed.

Graham T. Allison

#2. Great loves were almost always great tragedies. Perhaps it was because love was never truly great until the element of sacrifice entered into it.

Mary Roberts Rinehart

#3. It would be one of the great tragedies of history if at the very moment of the victory, now within our grasp, such distrust, such lack of faith, should prejudice the entire undertaking after the colossal losses of life, material and treasure. Churchill

David McCullough

#4. I think classical music tuition is, well, was when I was a child, was an abomination. I think in some ways it is one of life's great tragedies for everybody who gives up an instrument.

Hugh Laurie

#5. It's one of the great tragedies of our contemporary life in America, that families fall apart. Almost everybody has that in common.

Sam Shepard

#6. It is one of the great tragedies of the US, that most learn most of what they know about the government from the government.

James Bovard

#7. One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#8. But one of the great tragedies of life is that you cannot force people to read what they ought, as good as it might be for them.
- Roland Gardner
"Query

Robert Boyczuk

#9. Let us toast to good things about bad times, to old friends and new enemies, to great tragedies and small pleasures!

P.M. Steffen

#10. Few of the great tragedies of history were created by the village idiot, and many by the village genius.

Thomas Sowell

#11. This is one of the great tragedies of the Bush administration. The more successful they've been at intercepting and stopping bad guys, the less proof there is that we're in danger ... . It's almost like they should every once in a while have allowed an attack to get through just to remind us.

Newt Gingrich

#12. I've experienced great things, I've experienced great tragedies. I've done almost everything I could possibly ever imagine doing, but I just know that there's more.

Dave Grohl

#13. ...I told myself that, after all, life was like that for most of us - the small unpleasantness rather than the great tragedies; the little useless longings rather than the great renunciations and dramatic love affairs of history or fiction.

Barbara Pym

#14. One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all.

Arthur C. Clarke

#15. Small pleasures must correct great tragedies, therefore of gardens in the midst of war I bold tell.

Vita Sackville-West

#16. It is one of history's great tragedies that American conservatism, born in part in resistance to Soviet torture, should end by endorsing it in America, by Americans.

Andrew Sullivan

#17. We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history. The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before.

Lester R. Brown

#18. One of the great tragedies I see is people not putting every effort into the foundation of their marriage. My grandmother told me that it's one man and one woman for life and that your marriage is worth fighting for.

Kay Robertson

#19. I try to find humor in everything I do, because I think all great plays - even great tragedies - have enormous humor in them.

Marian Seldes

#20. Great tragedies have great consequences. They ripple through the fabric of this world and the next. When the loss is too great for either world to bear, Everlost absorbs the shock, like a cushion between the two.

Neal Shusterman

#21. Discrimination due to age is one of the great tragedies of modern life. The desire to work and be useful is what makes life worth living, and to be told your efforts are not needed because you are the wrong age is a crime.

Johnny Ball

#22. One of the great tragedies we witness almost daily is the tragedy of men of high aim and low achievement. Their motives are noble. Their proclaimed ambition is praiseworthy. Their capacity to achieve is great. But their discipline is weak. They succumb to indolence. Appetite robs them of will.

Gordon B. Hinckley

#23. If we were entirely sane, if madness did not have a serious grip on one side of us, other people's tragedies would hold a great deal less interest for us.

Alain De Botton

#24. War is tragedy. The great war stories are tragedies. It's the failure of diplomacy. 'War and Peace,' 'A Farewell to Arms,' 'For Whom the Bell Tolls.' Those are some of the greatest tragedies.

David Mamet

#25. There are some great roles mostly in Shakespeare's tragedies which no one can play at full strength from beginning to end. One simply hopes that one can hit the peaks as often as one has the strength.

Peggy Ashcroft

#26. In Dune and Dune Messiah, he [Frank Herbert] was cautioning against pride and overconfidence, that form of narcissism described in Greek tragedies that invariably led to the great fall.

Brian Herbert

#27. It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people. There

Terry Pratchett

#28. The dead worry the living because their silence reminds us how little the great comedies and tragedies in our lives matter and how little the universe would care if we'd never lived at all.
Nara

Jordan MacLean

#29. That is the great mistake about the affections. It is not the rise and fall of empires, the birth and death of kings, or the marching of armies that move them most. When they answer from their depths, it is to the domestic joys and tragedies of life.

Amelia Barr

#30. have seen how the fear of becoming subject to God's revenge and punishment has paralyzed the mental and emotional lives of many people, independently of their age, religion, or life-style. This paralyzing fear of God is one of the great human tragedies.

Henri J.M. Nouwen

#31. The tragic hero usurps the function of the gods and attempts to remake the world.

Helen Gardner

#32. What I love most about nature is how indifferent it is to us humans and human suffering. While we are here with our little or big tragedies - the wind is blowing, the leaves are rustling in the trees, the flowers bloom, and die - there's a great comfort in that indifference,

Valzhyna Mort

#33. Great art is not a matter of presenting one side or another, but presenting a picture so full of the contradictions, tragedies, [and] insights of the period that the impact is at once disturbing and satisfying.

Pauli Murray

#34. You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?

Tom Stoppard

#35. That is why most great love stories are tragedies.

Agatha Christie

#36. Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, but by people being fundamentally people.

Terry Pratchett