Top 100 Human Tragedy Quotes
#1. Human trafficking is a human tragedy. It's an outrage against any decent people.
Mark Shields
#2. Reporters ... most were carrion who fed on human tragedy.
JoAnn Ross
#3. The greatest human tragedy is to give up the search. Nothing is of greater importance than the life of our deep heart. To lose heart is to lose everything.
John Eldredge
#4. 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
#5. If there is any human tragedy, there is only one, and it occurs when we forget who we are and remain silent while a stranger takes up residence inside our skin.
James Lee Burke
#6. Nothing captures human interest more than human tragedy.
Dan Brown
#7. Nothing captured human interest like
human tragedy.
Dan Brown
#8. I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.
Elie Wiesel
#9. The murder of a dozen innocent people is unquestionably a human tragedy. But that is no excuse for reacting blindly by preventing hundreds of thousands of other people from defending themselves against meeting the same fate.
Thomas Sowell
#10. You and I were created for joy, and if we miss it we miss the reason for our existence. If our joy is honest joy, it must somehow be congruous with human tragedy. This is the test of joy's integrity. It is compatible with pain. Only the heart that hurts has a right to joy.
Lewis B. Smedes
#11. Everyone gets wounded in this world and everyone has within them some golden qualities that can serve to heal the wounds of time and the traumatic effects of human tragedy.
Michael Meade
#12. Knowledge and education are the key to this human tragedy which is a bonfire of hate fueled by ignorance.
Christina Engela
#13. Thriller novelists get asked - berated, sometimes - about whether their work glorifies bad behavior, even, exploits human tragedy for entertainment.
M.J. Rose
#14. Everybody looked at Sully suspiciously. A rumor that he had burned up in the blaze had been circulating, and people had quickly adjusted to the idea of profound human tragedy. They were reluctant to give it up, Sully could tell. He smiled apologetically at the crowd.
Richard Russo
#15. I have learned that human existence is essentially tragic. It is only the love of God, disclosed and enacted in Christ, that redeems the human tragedy and makes it tolerable. No, more than tolerable. Wonderful.
Mark Twain
#16. Divorce is the one human tragedy that reduces everything to cash.
Rita Mae Brown
#17. When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don't see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy.
Joseph Heller
#18. It is a first class human tragedy that people of the earth who claim to believe in the message of Jesus, whom they describe as the Prince of Peace, show little of that belief in actual practice.
Mahatma Gandhi
#19. Music is part of human life and partakes of the human tragedy. There is much more music in the world than is allowed to change into heard sounds and prove its point.
Rebecca West
#20. The fact that human conscience remains partially infantile throughout life is the core of human tragedy.
Erik Erikson
#21. Samurai films, like westerns, need not be familiar genre stories. They can expand to contain stories of ethical challenges and human tragedy.
Roger Ebert
#22. The Tragedy of the human condition is that the very things that make us interesting and culturally important and progressively brilliant are our differences; and these are also the principle reasons for our prejudices
Bryce Courtenay
#23. Europe is standing on the brink of the greatest tragedy in the history of the human race: a new world war, that may involve the doom of our entire civilisation.
Vidkun Quisling
#24. But whenever tragedy strikes, one is left either to die or with a plethora of ifs and buts to ponder over.
Kudrat Dutta Chaudhary
#25. What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? Doesn't laughter also have a claim to that lofty title? I want to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in serious music.
Dmitri Shostakovich
#26. The conviction of tragedy that rises out of his [John Dos Passos's] work is the steady protest of a sensitive democratic conscience against the tyranny and the ugliness of society, against the failure of a complete human development under industrial capitalism.
Alfred Kazin
#27. 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.
Norman Cousins
#28. 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
#29. The tragedy of my species xxx is that it does not live in its own time. Homo sapiens is locked on history's rearview mirror, never the road ahead, bent on catching some presumed lost paradise xxx
xxx
The human race is destroying itself with nostalgia ...
James K. Morrow
#30. 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.
Helen Hayes
#31. Every human being has gone through a tragedy of sorts. And the idea is that you have two paths you can take, you can find that alchemy that turns lead into gold, find that magic where you can see the loss as an entry point for learning and grow from it and become wiser and stronger.
Jillian Michaels
#32. 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.
Clarence John Laughlin
#33. What was there about the human condition that made us hold on to tragedy with such tenacity and easily forgo the happiness we could reach readily?
V.C. Andrews
#34. The unavoidable has touched the life of every human being on the face of the earth. Some have rebounded, others have given up
but all of us have felt the wings of tragedy brushing against us.
Paulo Coelho
#35. It is a tragedy, perhaps, that human beings can get so much energy and enthusiasm from hate.
Kurt Vonnegut
#36. The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
Jim Holt
#37. The real tragedy is that we're all human beings, and human beings have a sense of dignity. Any domination by one human over another leads to a loss of some part of his dignity. Is one's dignity that big it can be crumbled away like that?
Yusuf Idris
#38. Can one be fully human without experiencing tragedy? The only tragedy there is in the world is ignorance; all evil comes from that.
Anthony De Mello
#39. Here's how you think about it: Together you constructed many things throughout your life. Then her body disappeared, but the constructions still remain. Human beings die: That's natural. But to accept her death is to lose all hope.
Michael Paterniti
#40. Human beings do not like to look squarely into the face of tragedy. Gloom is unpopular.
Saul Alinsky
#41. Catharsis. Revenge cleanses. Aristotle wrote that the human soul is purged by the fear and compassion that tragedy evokes. It's a frightening thought that we fulfil the soul's innermost desire through the tragedy of revenge, isn't it.
Jo Nesbo
#42. I guess it's human nature to question yourself, to question why all the pain has had to happen? sometimes there isn't any answers it just is what it is and how we make ourselves feel and see through that, is what will determine how we move forward.
Nikki Rowe
#43. Human comedy is more profound than tragedy. In tragedy we die and it is very sad. In comedy we avoid death, and it is even sadder.
Jennifer Stone
#44. Global laissez-faire is not a conspiracy of corporate America. It is a tragedy - one of several that have occurred in the twentieth century - in which an hubristic ideology runs aground on enduring human needs that it has failed to comprehend.
John Gray
#45. This is a badly broken world, full of wars and cruelty and senseless tragedy. Every human being who inhabits it is served his or her portion of unhappiness and wake up nights.
Stephen King
#46. We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward. In times of tragedy, of war, of necessity, people do amazing things. The human capacity for survival and renewal is awesome.
Isabel Allende
#47. It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be nothing more than the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump.
David Ormsby-Gore, 5th Baron Harlech
#48. The tragedy of human history is decreasing happiness in the midst of increasing comforts.
Chinmayananda Saraswati
#49. That is not merely a central tragedy of human existence: It is also the political history of the world.
Dean Koontz
#50. I do not see how it is possible for an intelligent human being to conclude that the Song of Solomon is the work of God, and that the tragedy of Lear was the work of an uninspired man.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#51. 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
#52. Families, friends and communities often find a source of courage rising up from within. Indeed, sadly, it seems that it is tragedy that often draws out the most and the best from the human spirit
Queen Elizabeth II
#53. We are only human, and the Gods have fashioned us for love. This is our greatest glory and our greatest tragedy.
George R R Martin
#54. It is sad but true that sometimes we need the tragedy to help us to see how human we are and how we are more alike than we are different.
Maya Angelou
#55. The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history.
Stephen Jay Gould
#56. Human beings have capitalized on the silence of animals, just as certain human beings have historically imposed silence on certain other human beings by denying slaves the right to literacy, denying women the right to own property, and denying both the right to vote.
Gary Steiner
#57. The willingness to challenge hardships taps the power within human beings to transform even a place of tragedy into a stage for fulfilling one's mission.
Daisaku Ikeda
#58. Tragedy should remain the right of human beings, subject, in their conditions or in their own nature, to the dire law of necessity. To them it is salvation and beatification.
Isak Dinesen
#59. Aristotle wrote that the human soul is purged by the fear and compassion that tragedy evokes.
Jo Nesbo
#60. Ferdinand Foch said, "The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire." What a tragedy to leave this life without a flicker of a legacy, without a flame of a witness.
James Poitras
#61. I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.
Mark Rothko
#62. Man can and must prevent the tragedy of famine in the future instead of merely trying with pious regret to salvage the human wreckage of the famine, as he has so often done in the past.
Norman Borlaug
#63. The view which he has given of human life has a melancholy hue,
but he feels conscious that he has drawn these dark tints from a
conviction that they are really in the picture, and not from a jaundiced
eye or an inherent spleen of disposition.
Thomas Robert Malthus
#64. 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
#65. The tragedy of human life consists in our vain attempts to stretch the limits of things which can never become unlimited, to reach the infinite by absurdly adding to the rungs of the ladder of the finite.
Rabindranath Tagore
#66. The acts of the human race on the world's stage have doubtless a coherent unity, but the meaning of the vast tragedy enacted will be visible only to the eye of God, until the end, which will reveal it perhaps to the last man.
Alfred De Vigny
#67. The quotation falsely attributed to Stalin, 'One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,' gets the numbers wrong but captures a real fact about human psychology. (p. 220)
Steven Pinker
#68. Tragedy is the greatest art form of all. It gives us the courage to continue with our life by exposing us to the pain of life. It is unsentimental, it takes us seriously as human beings, it is not condescending. Paradoxically, by seeing pain we are made greater, it becomes a need.
Howard Barker
#69. Getting used to our blessings is one of the most important non-evil generators of human evil, tragedy and suffering.
Abraham Maslow
#70. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death.
Whittaker Chambers
#71. The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense.
H.L. Mencken
#72. I do not just want you at your best.
I almost do not care
where your Happiness lives,
but please,
let me visit your pain?
Take me to the place
where your sadness goes,
and show me the tragedy
that no one knows.
Meraaqi
#73. No popularity exists when tragedy strikes. All that's left are human hearts and love and ache. We all love each other, deep down, and when we see another soul in pain we can't help but hurt too.
Maya Van Wagenen
#74. We simply prefer to deny death or tragedy at all costs and, with it, a fundamental aspect of life. We do this instead of acknowledging that suffering represents one of the strongest incentives of life, which is the base of human solidarity and what brings intensity to happiness.
Claudia Llosa
#75. It seemed to us that all people to a greater or lesser degree belong to one of these two types, that almost every one of us resembles either Don Quixote or Hamlet.
Ivan Turgenev
#76. Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the hungry hours.
Virginia Woolf
#77. he explains that tragedy's most cruel lesson is not that human beings are flawed, or that fate can be unkind, but that no one can ever slip the bonds of time. Outside,
Jean Hegland
#78. If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.
Richard Yates
#79. The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.
Dawn Powell
#80. Tragedy dramatizes human life as potentiality and fulfillment. Its virtual future, or Destiny, is therefore quite different from that created in comedy. Comic Destiny is Fortune
Susanne Katherina Langer
#81. For the time being, it need only be said that the philosopher in question made much of human existence as a tragedy that need not have been were it not for the intervention in our lives of a single, calamitous event: the evolution of consciousness - parent of all horrors.
Thomas Ligotti
#82. The office of drama is to exercise, possibly to exhaust, human emotions. The purpose of comedy is to tickle those emotions into an expression of light relief; of tragedy, to wound them and bring the relief of tears. Disgust and terror are the other points of the compass.
Laurence Olivier
#83. For wolves and pigs and bears, thinking that they're human is a tragedy. For a cat, it's an experience.
Terry Pratchett
#84. We have focused only on the negatives, and not enough on incredible stories of the human spirit and of rebirth and rebuilding. That's equally important as the tragedy.
Steve Perry
#85. 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
#86. A perfect tragedy is the noblest production of human nature.
Joseph Addison
#87. This, for Homer, is the tragedy of being human: to desire freedom, and be tortured by a sense of autonomy, and yet be imprisoned by forces beyond our control.
Kenan Malik
#88. I'm a huge fan of Jack Lemmon, he was someone who managed to tread that line between comedy and tragedy and sometimes give very big performances, but they were never over-demonstrative and they were never not based on a kind of real truthful human being.
Steve Coogan
#89. 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.
Ayn Rand
#90. For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one's predicament into a human achievement.
Viktor E. Frankl
#92. For all the loss and tragedy I have known, my life has taught me that the human spirit like the lifted hands of the blind, will rise above chaos and destruction, as wings in flight
Vaddey Ratner
#93. What is especially disturbing about the political left is that they seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition. Instead, they tend to see the problems of the world as due to other people not being as wise or as noble as themselves.
Thomas Sowell
#94. Every tragedy of the human experience can be attributed to one human decision - the decision to withdraw from each other.
Neale Donald Walsch
#95. Maybe the tragedy of the human race was that we had forgotten that we are each divine.
Shirley Maclaine
#96. 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
#97. Human life is an incongruous combination of tragedy and comedy.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#98. Folly is
so human that it has common roots with poetry and tragedy; it is
revealed as much in the insane asylum as in the writings of a
Cervantes or a Shakespeare, or in the deep psychological insights
and cries of revolt of a Nietzsche.
Richard Howard
#99. There is nothing in human affairs that is a true subject for ridicule. Beneath comedy lies the ferment of tragedy; the farcical is but a cloak for coming catastrophe.
Gabriel Chevallier
#100. The candle glimmers but an hour. The night
Looms in its ancient hunger. Would you know
The tragedy of human love and need?
Gaze on the stars, then on a brother's face!
George Sterling
