Top 100 Great Tragedy Quotes
#1. As one who appreciated the tragic side of eating, it seemed to him that anything other than fruit for dessert implied a reprehensible frivolity, and cakes in particular ended up annihilating the flavour of quiet sadness that must be allowed to linger at the end of a great culinary performance.
Manuel Vazquez Montalban
#2. Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
Karl Marx
#3. In the context of stress, the great paradox of the modern age may be that there is not more hardship, just more news - and too much of it. The 24/7 streaming torrent of tragedy and demands flashing at us from an array of digital displays keeps the amygdala flying.
John J. Ratey
#4. I always wanted to tell the story of how Pearl Jam is the story of lightning striking twice. As well as being the flipside of the classic rock tale where great promise ends in tragedy. This is where tragedy begins great promise.
Cameron Crowe
#5. In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.
Dennis Lehane
#6. 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
#7. There is within you, waiting to be called, a great source of power called courage. Call its name and it will give you the strength to confront challenges despite fear and to continue and the heart to continue with bold confidence despite the pain of caused by tragedy.
Michael Josephson
#8. A great tragedy passes from crest to hollow of passion, rises and sinks again, as rhythmically as sea-waves.
Austin O'Malley
#9. The artist, surgeon, through clay form, can only look for cure with great obstinacy until he discovers, repeatedly, that love is god's only gift that enables man to transcend his tragedy and regain his wholeness and well-being beyond the claws of evil, rampaging as evil may be.
Jabra Ibrahim Jabra
#10. Well, I think the great tragedy in American politics is what is legal, not what is illegal.
Jack Abramoff
#11. He was a good fellow, but his rejoicing at the one little part, in which he was officially interested, of so great a tragedy, was an object-lesson in the limitations of sympathetic understanding. He
Bram Stoker
#12. I always think a good sports movie is emblematic in the same way that a great Greek tragedy really has a certain kind of structure, or a Shakespearean play if you're looking at a comedy or a tragedy, is that these are the heights and depths of human emotion.
Carla Gugino
#13. 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.
Leo Szilard
#14. Most epiphanies happen after great loss or tragedy. The soul is equipped to deal with dynamic events because of its elastic quality. Energy is mutable, it can change its presence, but not its tone.
S.L. Northey
#15. Every great tragedy forms a fertile soil in which a great recovery can take root and blossom ... but only if you plant the seeds.
Steve Maraboli
#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. ..there was a moment when the living room vanished and I saw a great, mushroom-shaped cloud rising into a blue sky. I saw it quite distinctly.
Masuji Ibuse
#18. I hate England and its hopelessness. I hate [Arnold] Bennett's resignation. Tragedy ought really to be a great big kick at misery.
D.H. Lawrence
#19. Shakespeare didn't conceive of his tragedy in Aristotelian terms - that is, as a tragedy of the fall of a flawed great man - but rather as a collision of deeply held and irreconcilable principles, embodied in characters who are destroyed when these principles collide.
James Shapiro
#20. The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast and largely hostile environment, in which we can achieve great things only by defying the gods; and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment.
Norbert Wiener
#21. Roman Polanski is a man who cares deeply about his art and its place in this world. What happened to him on his incredible path is filled with tragedy, and most men would have collapsed. Instead, he became a great artist and continues to make great films.
Harvey Weinstein
#22. To me, the Republican Party is the real great tragedy of the last 25 years because there are lot of good and decent people and a lot of good political points [that have] come from the Republican Party in the post-war period, but it has been hijacked by these fundamentalist wackos.
Alec Baldwin
#23. I make art when I can't gather the words to say.
Nikki Rowe
#24. Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?
May Sarton
#25. The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute.
Rebecca Harding Davis
#26. Great tragedy gives us opportunities for great kindness.
Karen White
#27. Syria has become the great tragedy of this century - a disgraceful humanitarian calamity with suffering and displacement unparalleled in recent history,
Antonio Guterres
#28. 'King of California' was just, I thought, a really great, fresh, original kind of script. I loved the tone, the mix of tragedy, comedy, and drama, and that it was a good part.
Michael Douglas
#29. To survive one tragedy was to learn you cannot survive them all, and this knowledge was both a freedom and a great loss.
Chris Womersley
#30. Finally on Sunday morning, October 7, 1849, "He became quiet and seemed to rest for a short time. Then, gently, moving his head," he said, "Lord help my poor soul." As he had lived so he died-in great misery and tragedy.
Edgar Allan Poe
#31. 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
#32. I'm interested in ordinary experience, and regardless of the precise definition of ordinary, and I've found that in so-called ordinary experience, there is as much comedy, tragedy, sadness, as there is in great drama. And I don't invent it, I recognize it.
Frederick Wiseman
#33. Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.
Jacques Barzun
#34. It reminds me too much of how little life changes: how, without dramatic events or high resolves, without tragedy, without even pathos, a reasonably endowed, reasonable well-intentioned man can walk through the world's great kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry.
Wallace Stegner
#35. The Civil War was the climax of a tragedy that was preordained from the time of the Revolution. Only with the elimination of slavery could this nation that Jefferson had called "the world's best hope" for democracy even begin to fulfill its great promise.
Gordon S. Wood
#36. An uneventful, quiet life together is more my idea of a romance."
"Really? Oh. Well. It won't get you featured in any of the ballads though."
"Yes," he said, with a heavy sigh. "And that will be the great tragedy of my romance.
Sonal Panse
#37. How we respond to tragedy is the hallmark of character. Suffering a great loss places us at a spiritual milepost. The wind of our souls can either sour and wither or rejoice and thrive.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#38. 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
#39. The great political tragedy of our time is that conservative leaders in America have chosen to use their superior messaging and political skills to thwart serious action on global warming.
Joseph J. Romm
#40. Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery.
D.H. Lawrence
#42. Tragedy warms the soul, elevates the heart, can and ought to create heroes. In this sense, perhaps, France owes a part of her great actions to Corneille.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#43. I have a job to do. Make money for my clients. Period. But boy it gets morbid when you start making investments that work out extra great if a tragedy occurs.
Michael Lewis
#44. I can cry myself to sleep because I'm not as great as Leonard Cohen, but who cares? Maybe you can't be as great as some people, but it's a tragedy when you don't follow your dreams.
Lykke Li
#45. What makes America great is that we can come together during times of national tragedy.
Dennis Hastert
#46. 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
#47. What is honor compared to a woman's love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms ... or the memory of a brother's smile? Wind and words. Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.
George R R Martin
#48. A life that is never willing to change is a great tragedy - a wasted life. Change is a necessary part of a growing life, and we need change in order to remain fresh and to keep progressing.
Rick Warren
#49. A great tragedy is occurring. Millions of people are dying prematurely. These people are killing themselves and they don't even know it.
Tim Loy
#50. I took comfort in doing without because I knew it was all for the greater good. We all made great sacrifices, none more so than those boys who lost their lives. Tragedy was part of our daily routine. But through it all, I never understood the point of being sad when I could choose to be happy.
Megan McCafferty
#51. No one can make the most of himself until he looks upon his life as a magnificent possibility, the materials for a great masterpiece, to mar or spoil which would be a great tragedy.
Orison Swett Marden
#52. The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
W. Somerset Maugham
#53. In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that enormous, unanswerable question.
Michael Shaara
#54. It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.
Philip K. Dick
#55. , imagine a loamy earth that starts with genocide, then adds a mix of further disease, wars, hurricanes, murder, great fires, dueling, insurrection and slavery, just to name a few of the many instances of tragedy. What dark seed would take root in such a disturbed and twisted soil?
James Caskey
#56. The great challenge is to refuse to let the bad things that happen to us do bad things to us. That is the crucial difference between adversity and tragedy.
Neal A. Maxwell
#57. Self-tragedy is always a great way to dramatize yourself - ask any teenager.
David Lee Roth
#58. 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.
Rupert Brooke
#59. Our pasts shape us,Sam.None of us the person he or she used to be,it's true, but what we are still contains a great proportion of what we once were.Nothing,not even suffering the worst kind of tragedy,alters us completely.At core,we are set in stone.
James Lovegrove
#60. Unemployment is a great tragedy. The man who goes about hopelessly seeking work in order to earn bread for his children is a living reproach to civilization.
Carlos Saavedra Lamas
#61. Man can recover from epic tragedy, he can live through immense hardship and endure the great injustices of life, but take away his hope and man is truly broken.
David Alejandro Fearnhead
#62. Until he [man] has become fully human, until he learns to conduct himself as a member of the earth, he will continue to create gods who will destroy him. The tragedy of Greece lies not in the destruction of a great culture but in the abortion of a great vision.
Henry Miller
#63. To give space when what one most yearns for is closeness, that is both the great test and great tragedy of love.
Simone De Beauvoir
#65. If you don't win, it's not a great tragedy - the worst that happens is that you lose a game.
Bobby Fischer
#66. When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.
Vera Brittain
#67. In spite of all the tragedy and cruelty, all humans have a kind heart, great spirit, and an insatiable love for the humanity.
Debasish Mridha
#68. To turn away from the great questions and dilemmas of life is a tragedy, for the quest for meaning and truth makes life worth living.
Charles Colson
#69. But far within him something cried For the great tragedy to start, The pang in lingering mercy fall And sorrow break upon his heart. - EDWIN MUIR
Doris Lessing
#70. There has never been an American tragedy. There have only been great failures.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#71. It has all the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I have not been wounded.
Oscar Wilde
#72. 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
#73. It is a great tragedy that science, this wonderful process for finding out what is true, has ceded the spiritual uplift of its central revelations: the vastness of the universe, the immensity of time, the relatedness of all life, and life's preciousness on our tiny planet.
Ann Druyan
#74. Few of the great tragedies of history were created by the village idiot, and many by the village genius.
Thomas Sowell
#75. It's always the same old problem: how to find ourselves in the great yammering of ego and tragedy and discomfort and obsession with everyone else's destinies.
Anne Lamott
#76. The tragic hero usurps the function of the gods and attempts to remake the world.
Helen Gardner
#77. To do great things, we need to be able to endure tragedy and setbacks. We've got to love what we do and all that it entails, good and bad. We have to learn to find joy in every single thing that happens.
Ryan Holiday
#78. I think it would be a great tragedy to devote medical resources and genetic technological breakthroughs to purposes that are not to do with health or medicine, but instead are to do with satisfying the desires that are created by the consumer society.
Michael Sandel
#79. The great tragedy of atheists is that they walk through this world and have no one to thank.
Leo Tolstoy
#80. Tragedy is a great storytelling form. It worked extremely well for Shakespeare. It worked extremely well for Jim Cameron with 'Titanic.'
Carlton Cuse
#81. It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.
Loren Eiseley
#82. The Great and the Least, The Rich and the Poor, The Weak and the Strong, In Joy and Sorrow, In Tragedy and Triumph, You are ALL MY CHILDREN
Agnes Nixon
#84. Some are born rich
While others poor;
Some are born free
While others captives;
Some are born blessed
While others deprived;
Some are born strong
While others weak;
And some are born great
While others slaves.
It is only in this life
blessings are unequal.
Emmanuel Aghado
#85. We have defined holiness through what we separate ourselves from rather than what we give ourselves to. I am convinced the great tragedy is not the sins that we commit, but the life that we fail to live. You
Erwin Raphael McManus
#86. There are moments in history when brooding tragedy and its dark shadows can be lightened by recalling great moments of the past.
Indira Gandhi
#87. There's never enough information ... That's the great tragedy of human knowledge. No matter how much we think we know, we can never predict the future.
Orson Scott Card
#88. As he talked, I thought, "Maybe I'm wrong about the guy." Put him with someone like Anna Gunderson, a nice woman who has suffered a great tragedy, and his empathetic side came out.
And then I realized he was faking it.
Kelley Armstrong
#89. There is something of tragedy and a 'comedy of eternal errors' when we attempt to write great scripts of rescue when we are the ones in need of rescue.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#90. It is a tragedy, I feel, that people of a different sexual type are caught in a world which shows so little understanding for homosexuals and is so crassly indifferent to the various gradations and variations of gender and their great significance in life.
Emma Goldman
#91. Death is a great tragedy ... a profound loss ... I don't accept it ... I think people are kidding themselves when they say they are comfortable with death.
Ray Kurzweil
#92. The essence of Macbeth is seeing a great and intelligent man succumb to the forces of darkness. What gives the tragedy
William Shakespeare
#93. 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.
Joseph Addison
#94. It was no great tragedy being Judy Garland's daughter. I had tremendously interesting childhood years - except they had little to do with being a child.
Liza Minnelli
#95. The great tragedy of our lives seems to be that we are smart enough to ask the questions of meaning but too dumb to really figure it out.
Donald Miller
#96. Great tragedy has come to us, and we are meeting it with the best that is in our country, with courage and concern for others because this is America. This is who we are.
George W. Bush
#97. I have a pretty good math mind, so I can see patterns, but I don't have a great ear. It's like a tragedy - I can see so much more natural musical ability in so many other people.
Bo Burnham
#98. Risk is the inevitable product of liberty - and it's responsible not only for great tragedy, but also great triumph.
Tony Snow
#99. You see tragedy requires persons of heroic stature. It works on the principle of people being more than humansuper-humanand also being only too human. But there just aren't many great figures around now, so the tragic mechanisms can't work.
Martin Amis
#100. Yet, after some time, he wearied of them, and would sit in his box at the opera, either alone or with Lord Henry, listening in rapt pleasure to "Tannhauser" and seeing in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul.
Oscar Wilde
