Top 100 Life Is Tragic Quotes
#1. Life is tragic comedy, in a way. There is humor.
Tcheky Karyo
#3. Human life is fatally fragile and subject to forces beyond our power to manage. Life is tragic.
Timothy Keller
#4. The story of a life can be as long or as short as the teller wishes. Whether the life is tragic or enlightened, the classic gravestone inscription marking simply the dates of birth and death has, in its brevity, much to recommend it.
Michel Houellebecq
#5. Whenever tragic loss occurs, you either resist or you yield. Some people become bitter or deeply resentful; others become compassionate, wise, and loving. Yielding means inner acceptance of what is.You are open to life.
Eckhart Tolle
#6. Life is magical. If life had no magic, it would be tragic.
Debasish Mridha
#7. With mind distracted, never thinking, "Death is coming,"
To slave away on the pointless business of mundane life,
And then to come out empty
it is a tragic error. (116)
trans by Robert Thurman
Huston Smith
#8. What shall I say further? Shall I not stop short and leave to your imaginations to portray the tragic deeds of war? Is it not enough that I here leave it even to unexperience to fancy the hardships, the anxieties, the dangers, even of the best life of a soldier?
Deborah Sampson
#9. As many know, and especially those who may have young sons or daughters at colleges or universities, the last thing you want to hear is a call that perhaps one of your children was injured or, even worse, lost their life in a tragic fire at a dorm or campus housing.
Vito Fossella
#10. One of the tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon - instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.
Dale Carnegie
#11. It is tragic that we have lost one of our nation's finest actors in the prime of his life. Heath Ledger's diverse and challenging roles will be remembered as some of the great performances by an Australian actor.
Kevin Rudd
#12. Life is full of moments that are good - winning a lottery, seeing a beautiful woman, a great dinner - but the whole thing is tragic. It's an oasis that is very pleasant.
Woody Allen
#13. Guston tacked toward celebrating the crap of life not for its own ironic sake, but as the ever-present still life that surrounds the embarrassingly, even tragically human. No Duchampian object is ever tragic. Many if not most of Guston's objects, even the most hilarious, are.
Ross Feld
#14. What is ugly about life is that it so often only provides uneasy half solutions that are so seldom pure and tragic ones.
Harry Graf Kessler
#16. Among all the tragic consequences of depression and war, this suppression of personal self-expression through one's life work is among the most poignant.
Henry Wriston
#17. How beautiful and horrible life is, Hema thought; too horrible to simply call tragic. Life is worse than tragic. p 108
Abraham Verghese
#18. And that is what Ultima tried to teach me, that the tragic consequences of life can be overcome by the magical strength that resides in the human heart.
Rudolfo Anaya
#19. The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.
Florence King
#20. Shakespeare's plays often turn on the idea of fate, as much drama does. What makes them so tragic is the gap between what his characters might like to accomplish and what fate provides them.
Nate Silver
#21. When something is tragic you never really forget it.
Sophia Olson
#22. There's something tragic in the fate of almost every person
it's just that the tragic is often concealed from a person by the banal surface of life ... A woman will complain of indigestion and not even know that what she means is that her whole life has been shattered.
Ivan Turgenev
#23. There is no reason for believing that any sort of gods exist, and quite good reasons for believing that they do not exist and never have. It has all been a gigantic waste of time and a waste of life. It would be a joke of cosmic proportions if it weren't so tragic.
Richard Dawkins
#24. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.
David Foster Wallace
#25. Lewd to the least drop in the tiniest vein, Our sex is fitly food for Tragic Poets, Our whole life's but a pile of kisses and babies. But, hardy Spartan, if you join with me All may be righted yet. O help me, help me.
Aristophanes
#26. If you start out with a tragic view of life, then anything since is just a bonus.
Freeman Dyson
#27. I look at the human life like an experiment. Every new moment, every new experience, tragic or otherwise, is an opportunity to gain a more accurate perspective and helps lead me to clarity.
Steve Gleason
#28. Truth is we are all tragedies waiting to happen; we just have to remember to have the rescue crew nearby when it strikes.
S. Elle Cameron
#29. When death becomes an escape, when it becomes attractive, the purpose of life is fulfilled. To teach one it's futility, it's worthlessness, that is the purpose of life. Incongruously, its value lies in having imparted that lesson.
Bhanggi
Faiqa Mansab
#30. Spiritual awakening is the most essential thing in man's life, and it is the sole purpose of being. Is not civilization, in all its tragic forms, a supreme motive for spiritual awakening?
Khalil Gibran
#31. The thing about surviving something truly tragic is that it changes your expectations forever. You make do with very little. You're grateful for crumbs.
Asher
Katy Regnery
#32. Trying to pump breath into a fairy tale is as arduous and tragic as ancient Greek theatre.
Terry A. O'Neal
#33. The news of life is carried via telephone. A baby's birth, a couple engaged, a tragic car accident on a late night highway - most milestones of the human journey, good or bad, are foreshadowed by the sound of a ringing.
Mitch Albom
#34. Life can be very funny and very tragic. Everyone has stuff that they've been through that makes up whatever fire it is that they have in their gut, but nobody goes around wearing that as their outmost exterior, all the time.
Emmy Rossum
#35. Life is a tragic mystery. We are pierced and driven by laws we only half understand, we find that the lesson we learn again and again is that of accepting heroic helplessness.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
#36. It is not death or dying that is tragic, but rather to have existed without fully participating in life- that is the deepest personal tragedy.
Edward Abbey
#37. Life is a mystical and tragic thing. It is a journey often full of fear, when it ought to be full of hope. It's fascinating to look back on your life and feel as though most of it was a precursor to the rest of it; to what was always supposed to be.
L.K. Hill
#38. Most people go on living their everyday life: half-frightened, half indifferent, they behold the ghostly tragic-comedy that is being performed on the international stage before the eyes and ears of the world.
Albert Einstein
#39. I think the tragic feeling is invoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing
his sense of personal dignity.
Arthur Miller
#40. I'm interested in everything about what it means to be a human being, so every role is an excuse to delve into a different way of life, a different socio-economic background, and a different tragic or comedic circumstance.
Rachelle Lefevre
#41. Early on in my life I comprehended that death is the most tragic event in our life. Events of early Monday July 14, 1958 [Coup in Iraq] had convinced me that hate is the most destructive force in our life.
Ala Bashir
#42. The kind of death you should mourn over is the one that happen when you abort your potentials prematurely! Life without purpose is a tragedy!
Israelmore Ayivor
#43. It is a tragic hour, that hour when we are finally driven to reckon with ourselves, when every avenue of mental distraction has been cut off and our own life and all its ineffaceable failures closes about us like the walls of that old torture chamber of the Inquisition.
Willa Cather
#44. All men are tragic ... All men are comic ... Every man is important if he loses his life; and every man is funny if he loses his hat.
G.K. Chesterton
#46. The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, - the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature ; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#47. Baseball is a universe as large as life itself, and therefore all things in life, whether good or bad, whether tragic or comic, fall within its domain.
Paul Auster
#48. I've come to realize that love is tragic, somewhere down the line it's inevitable. Fight for it.
Ann Marie Frohoff
#49. Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.
Paul Auster
#50. Emotions are the key to many aspects of life. They are precisely the elements that make human beings human. I think the fact that emotions have been reduced and put off to the side in intellectual work, particularly in the 20th Century, is tragic.
Bill Viola
#51. Life is too tragic for sadness: Let us rejoice.
Edward Abbey
#52. I don't need drugs. Life is already tragic enough ...
Eddie Vedder
#53. If there is tragic limitation in life there is also possibility. What we call maturity is the ability to see the two in some kind of balance into which we can fit creatively.
Ernest Becker
#54. The temper of mind that sees tragedy in life has not for its opposite the temper that sees joy. The opposite pole to the tragic view of life is the sordid view.
Edith Hamilton
#55. I love [Nikolai] Gogol's great eye for idiot behavior. Gogol said that life is so tragic, so stupendously sad that we'd better laugh a lot and enjoy ourselves. You either get a sense of humor going or you go under.
Mel Brooks
#56. You need to wake yourself up and take a grab at life. No one is going to hand it to you.
Danielle Steel
#57. Delightful, tragic, gloriously elegiac and riddled with puns-Close to Hugh is just like life, only so much more beautiful for being art.
Lynn Coady
#58. There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.
Oscar Wilde
#59. Nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one's true business in life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by circumstance into an uncongenial calling.
John Dewey
#60. I think that life is a friggin' magic carpet ride - it's amazing. Everything about life is mysterious and beautiful and touching and tragic and lovely and mystical.
Elizabeth Lesser
#61. My writing is soaked with the tears of my heart, An invisible rebellion that no man can see. Let our life stories become tragic art. Oh, Mama, oh, sisters, hear me, hear me." The
Lisa See
#62. Prophetic pragmatism attempts to keep alive the sense of alternative ways of life and of struggle based on the best of the past. In this sense, the praxis of prophetic pragmatism is tragic action with revolutionary intent, usually reformist consequences and always visionary outlook.
Cornel West
#63. There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#64. My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.
Alan Moore
#65. Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.
Virginia Woolf
#66. Life is not a piece of tragic fiction in which, at the end of the reading, we all get up and go out for drinks.
Marianne Williamson
#67. It is profoundly tragic that I am a slave, but it is profoundly joyous that I am God's slave, not that of a devil.
Kedar Joshi
#68. Unfortunately, love and compassion have been omitted from too many spheres of social interaction for too long. Usually confined to family and home, their practice in public life is considered impractical, even naive. This is tragic.
Dalai Lama
#69. Mother Firefly is the kind of character I've always wanted to play. She's larger than life, terribly tragic, and capable of a lot of love.
Leslie Easterbrook
#70. I don't want to suggest that matrimony was necessarily a tragic affair - some of our neighbours' marriages seemed quite functional, if somewhat routine; nevertheless, in the workaday world, it is wedlock that is most likely to offer the occasion for life-threatening disappointment.
John Burnside
#71. The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#72. Life to most Greeks may be either tragic or comic or a mixture of both; but one thing it never is - and that is, meaningless.
Helen Clark MacInnes
#73. Life is not a matter for simple optimism
for there is evil; nor for mere pessimism
for there is good. The possibility for good in the face of evil is what gives life tragic meaning.
Rollo May
#74. Dogs have fleas; people have each other. We are born to die. Life is a continuing tragic comedy. Everything and everyone we love suffers. Anybody who doesn't see that has not grown up and known life.
Frederick Lenz
#75. To be mature you have to realize what you value most ... Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one's own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#76. Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.
Willa Cather
#77. But when you lose a family member or something tragic happens, that stays with you forever. You never get over it. Knowing that you have to deal with that for the rest of your life ... Football is important, but not as important as you once thought it was.
Brett Favre
#78. I've got a peculiar weakness for criminals and artists. Neither takes life as it is. Any tragic story has to be in conflict with things as they are.
Stanley Kubrick
#79. It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.
C. G. Jung
#80. Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#81. People evolve and grow, and life is fascinating and fun and tragic.
Fred Durst
#82. What's tragic isn't that we can't retaliate...
What's truly tragic is...
...being consumed with vengeance and not being able to live your life.
Sui Ishida
#83. I'd be interested in finding out if there is a light you walk into, and if you do meet people from your life and walk hand in hand with Jesus. I would hate for my death to be tragic: I'd like to be old when it happens. But hopefully a young death is unlikely.
Brian Molko
#84. I made strength from everything that had happened to me, so that in the end even the final tragedy could not defeat me. And that is what Ultima tried to teach me, that the tragic consequences of life can be overcome by the magical strength that resides in the human heart.
Antonio
Rudolfo Anaya
#85. Life is beautifully tragic. Giving it up isn't the hard part; it's the living part that everyone struggles with.
Allison Blanchard
#86. For a lot of kids, the Boys and Girls Club is really a sanctuary, an oasis of sanity and safety for them because their home life is so tragic. Some of these kids have only one parent, and that one is addicted to drugs.
Judge Reinhold
#87. There is nothing as tragic as being alive and not enjoying life ... Life should be celebrated!
Joyce Meyer
#88. My point is that death is more tragic than life, than any life, because every life has hope of some kind.
Shalom Auslander
#89. Compassion begins with the acknowledgment of the single inescapable truth that is the foundation for the possibility of love between human beings - an awareness of the tragic sense of life.
Sam Keen
#90. Fortunately for the human race, pain, however piercing, is not a lasting emotion. The recollection of happiness lingers, but the consciousness never retains for long the first thrust of tragic loss. The details of daily life crowd in upon the mind.
Wallis Simpson
#91. We know that our life is essentially tragic. I'm absolutely not for handing over that very important department of our psyche to those who say, "Why didn't you say so before? God has a plan for you in mind."
Christopher Hitchens
#92. I've often felt that life is a hard deal and it's unrelentingly tragic and an uphill fight.
Woody Allen
#93. Real life is often sloppy, tragic, ugly, embarrassing, unglamorous, and not made for TV.
Jane Velez-Mitchell
#94. Romantic haste in drama brings
tears and sighs when the hero dies
but the curtain fall is final
when in life we take the tragic way
The sunset too is a glorious thing
but with it ends the day.
C. P. Klapper
#95. Nay, are there many situations more sublimely tragic than the struggle of the soul with the demand to renounce a work which has been all the significance of its life
a significance which is to vanish as the waters which come and go where no man has need of them?
George Eliot
#96. Though the life is very difficult and at times quite tragic, we must nonetheless be happy for being existed, for being the miracle very itself!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#97. The life of the nation is shot through with a certain falseness and hypocrisy, which are all the more tragic because they are so often subconscious rather than deliberate ... The soul of the people is putrescent, and until that becomes regenerate and clean, no good work can be done.
Frantz Fanon
#98. A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.
Ellen Glasgow
#99. Men who believe that the way to the mind is not by way of ice picks through the brain or large dosages of dangerous medicine but through an honest reckoning of the self.
Dennis Lehane
