Top 100 Quotes About Tragic Life
#1. How beautiful and horrible life is, Hema thought; too horrible to simply call tragic. Life is worse than tragic. p 108
Abraham Verghese
#3. Something this good was bound to end terribly. It was karma evening the score - you get a gorgeous man in return for your tragic life and early death.
Laura Thalassa
#4. It's all about creating a back story for the character and developing emotional responses that are true to life in relation to the character. It isn't necessary to live a tragic life to create from that place.
Corin Nemec
#5. It isn't enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means.
Cheryl Strayed
#6. The vast silence of Buddha overtakes
and overrules the oncoming roar
of tragic life that fills alleys and avenues;
it blocks the way of pedicabs, police, convoys.
Denise Levertov
#7. 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
#8. Life is magical. If life had no magic, it would be tragic.
Debasish Mridha
#9. It was a tragic end to a heroic life.
Chris Kyle
#10. We live in a dark and romantic and quite tragic world.
Karl Lagerfeld
#11. 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
#12. Some of it's magic, some of it's tragic, but I've had a good life all the way.
Jimmy Buffett
#13. I (God) will leave man to make the fateful guess, Will leave him torn between the no and yes, Leave him unresting till he rests in me, Drawn upward by the choice that makes him free, Leave him in tragic loneliness to choose, With all in life to win or all to lose.
Edwin Markham
#14. The same numbness and disappointment every day sends some people looking for something tragic for proof of life.
Bryant McGill
#15. Some of it's magic and some of it's tragic but I had a good life all the way.
Jimmy Buffett
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. I was darker than he was. And I'm not just talking about our skin coloring. He told me I had a tragic vision of life. "That's why you like Spider-Man.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. When something is tragic you never really forget it.
Sophia Olson
#30. 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
#31. Such was the cyclical nature of Galway life: finding tragedy in the simple things and simplicity in the tragic things.
Rhian J. Martin
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. If you start out with a tragic view of life, then anything since is just a bonus.
Freeman Dyson
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Isn't that the tragic thing about women? That we live on long after our passions have died?
Olivia Olivia
#39. I could spend my whole life photographing circuses. They combine everything I'm interested in - they're ironic, poetic, and corny at the same time. There's also something about a circus that's magical, sentimental, and almost tragic, like a Fellini film.
Mary Ellen Mark
#40. Herschel Grynszpan's life was enigmatic, elusive and tragic. The traces he left on the historical record are just sufficient to tantalize and baffle historians. Harlan Greene has woven from these threads a riveting novel, erotic, haunting, and profoundly moving.
Janette Turner Hospital
#41. No woman should build her life waiting for a man to come along and save her. It's a tragic waste of brains and talent.
Stephanie Grace Whitson
#42. The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die - although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born.
Erich Fromm
#43. Love made things feel precarious, and, when you got right down to it, everything in life was tenuous and fleeting and ultimately tragic.
Emily Giffin
#44. It was tragic how life had sucked her down to the bones, all her spontaneity her laughter and freedom had vanished. I knew then that I didn't ever want to be like that. Whatever happened, life was something too precious to give up on so easily.
Belinda Jeffrey
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Ours has become a world where a tragic number of people are more fascinated by materialism and the lives of distant narcissists than by their own life experience.
Brendon Burchard
#48. Life's still stupid but we got free of story out here under the beeches and the Big Dipper. We had enough of it, of things happening one after another and no end in sight. Of reversals and falling in love and tragic flaws, and by God if I see another motif in my business I will shoot it dead.
Catherynne M Valente
#49. Strange, how seldom a person knows which days of his life are tragic and which are happy,
Tom Reiss
#50. 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
#51. Trying to pump breath into a fairy tale is as arduous and tragic as ancient Greek theatre.
Terry A. O'Neal
#52. 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
#53. Theatre is a concentrate of life as normal. Theatre is a purified version of real life, an extraction, an essence of human behaviour that is stranger and more tragic and more perfect than everything that is ordinary about me and you.
Eleanor Catton
#54. At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can't fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I'm reading, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I think I'm in literature,' but my life was never like that.
Soledad O'Brien
#55. Samuel, I've never considered our relationship to be tragic. I will always remember you as my first love. The first guy who opened me up and saw in me something passionate and strong that needed to be brought to life. Tragic ... never. Beautiful ... always.
Angela Richardson
#56. She decided to make his life as terrible, tragic and complicated as possible, so that some day Percy Jackson would have a really hard time writing about it.
Rick Riordan
#57. 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
#58. If I have refused to risk, I have in the self-same decision refused to love. And if indeed I have refused to love, tragically I have refused to live. And when will I realize that that in and of itself is an unacceptable risk.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#59. 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
#60. It represents a place women go and are left confused because they do not hear the truth about abortion and their choices. They are in a sense abused by the medical procedures that are performed without quality medical instructions/information. It's a tragic place.
Abby Johnson
#61. And I thought to myself, even though life could be horrifying and earth-shattering, terrible and tragic, it was also filled with moments of breathtaking beauty. And sometimes you just had to laugh.
Mia Sheridan
#62. How tragic lives there are in this world! But there is a greater tragedy: People who have very hard lives often believe that they will have a better life after death! Losing hope in life and running after an absolute illusion is even a bigger tragedy!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#63. You know Americans are obsessed with life and death and rebirth, that's the American Cycle. You know, awakening, tragic, horrible death and then Phoenix rising from the ashes. That's the American story, again and again.
Billy Corgan
#64. I am a happy person and I choose to be a positive person. I think some people think my life has been tragic and there have been these horrible dramas but things really have been, and are, fine.
Patsy Kensit
#65. Every story is part of a whole, entire life, you know? Happy and sad and tragic and whatever, but an entire life. And books let you know them.
Sarah Ockler
#66. She was a natural blonde, with delicate hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives.
Michael Chabon
#67. Life is tragic comedy, in a way. There is humor.
Tcheky Karyo
#68. Like a white knight in a station wagon, he drove out of her life.
Andrea Hurst
#69. I have only danced my life. As a child I danced the spontaneous joy of growing things. As an adolescent, I danced with joy turning to apprehension of the first realisation of tragic undercurrents; apprehension of the pitiless brutality and crushing progress of life.
Isadora Duncan
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. In that one moment, I wrapped a thousand others. A lifetime of joy, sorrow, laughter, frowns, smiles, tears ... life!
Faraaz Kazi
#76. Some of its magic, some its tragic, but I've had a good life along the
way.
Jimmy Buffett
#77. Human life is fatally fragile and subject to forces beyond our power to manage. Life is tragic.
Timothy Keller
#78. 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
#79. I could feel everything. From the tragic cellos, to the tender sounds of the piano giving awe to my touch. My body slowly swayed to the sweet feel of the air sweeping over me. I felt myself being taken away as the hearts of my fans soared with me.
Charles Lee
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Just because [butterflies'] lives were short didn't mean they were tragic ... See, they have a beautiful life.
Lisa Genova
#85. The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance, the farther there is to go and the more there is to say, the less time there is to say it.
Gabrielle Roy
#86. On the unofficial level it was a glorious moment in our national life because young people decided that this had to stop, that they could no longer stand the shedding of blood in this tragic adventure in Southeast Asia.
William Kunstler
#88. He's that guy: the lawless, solitary, hurricane-hearted one who wreaks havoc, blowing through towns, through girls, through his own tragic misunderstood life.
Jandy Nelson
#89. What a tragic waste o engagement (selfies). Enjoy the moment. Do something more worthwhile with your time, anything. Stare out the window and think about life.
Benedict Cumberbatch
#91. 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
#92. It was sad, tragic - and true! Heaven could not be what Ruby had been used to. There had been nothing in her gay, frivolous life, her shallow ideals and aspirations, to fit her for that great change, or make the life to come seem to her anything but alien and unreal and undesirable.
L.M. Montgomery
#93. 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
#94. What give all that is tragic, whatever its form, the characteristic of the sublime, is the first inkling of the knowledge that the world and life can give no satisfaction, and are not worth our investment in them. The tragic spirit consists in this. Accordingly it leads to resignation.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#95. A box of new crayons! Now they're all pointy, lined up in order, bright and perfect. Soon they'll be a bunch of ground down, rounded, indistinguishable stumps, missing their wrappers and smudged with other colors. Sometimes life seems unbearably tragic.
Bill Watterson
#96. I've come to realize that love is tragic, somewhere down the line it's inevitable. Fight for it.
Ann Marie Frohoff
#97. Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.
Paul Auster
#98. I'm pretty good with languages. I know a bit of French and actually want to live in France some day so that I can get fluent. I think it'd be tragic to go through life only knowing one language.
Juliana Hatfield
#100. 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
