Top 100 What Tragedy Is Quotes
#1. We all know what tragedy is. "Yes, I'd rather not have any more tragedy, please. I'll have comedy, please." Comedy, in the Greek sense, only means that it has a happy ending.
Eric Drooker
#2. It is what we see when we imagine what the afterlife must be like: our happiest triumphs, our most sincere moments, stolen from the seam of our lives, a respite just before the onset of imminent tragedy.
Joe Meno
#3. 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
#4. Lest Arab governments be tempted out of sheer routine to rush into impulsive rejection, let me suggest that tragedy is not what men suffer but what they miss.
Abba Eban
#5. What you are is a fucking tragedy, Simon Snow. You literally couldn't be a bigger mess."
He tries to kiss me, but I pull back- "And you like that?"
"I love it." He says
"Why?"
"Because we match.
Rainbow Rowell
#6. IF YOU REALLY let life take you, if you release control and stop clinging to sameness, you can't imagine the places you'll end up. But most people don't do that. Most people get this death grip on what they know, and the only thing that loosens their grasp is some kind of tragedy.
Lisa Unger
#7. 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
#8. We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.
N. Scott Momaday
#9. It's a tragedy what is happening, what Bush is doing. All Bush wants is Iraqi oil. There is no doubt that the U.S. is behaving badly. Why are they not seeking to confiscate weapons of mass destruction from their ally Israel? This is just an excuse to get Iraq's oil.
Nelson Mandela
#10. There comes a precious moment in all of our lives when we are tapped on the shoulder and offered the opportunity to do something very special that is unique to us and our abilities, what a tragedy it would be if we are not ready or willing.
Winston S. Churchill
#11. To matter, to mind ... What we mind is in our power, but whether we matter may not be - and there's the tragedy ... Can anyone truthfully say, I don't matter and I don't mind?
Rebecca Goldstein
#12. The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes.
George Eliot
#13. What I'm interested in is happiness with a full awareness of the tragedy of life, the potential tragedy that lurks around every corner and the tragedy that actually is life.
Wolfgang Tillmans
#14. 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
#15. As the tragic writer rids us of what is petty and ignoble in our nature, so also the humorist rids us of what is cautious, calculating, and priggish
about half of our social conscience, indeed. Both of them permit us, in blessed moments of revelation, to soar above the common level of our lives.
Robertson Davies
#16. 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
#17. What makes America great is that we can come together during times of national tragedy.
Dennis Hastert
#18. It is an awesome tragedy in this life that, when asking what a person is and they reply doctor or lawyer or engineer, we don't say Well thats a nice little hobby, but why don't you take up writing or painting or music?
D.A. Botta
#19. And herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor, - all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked, - who is good? not that men are ignorant, - what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men. He
W.E.B. Du Bois
#20. It is a tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn't know - the less a man knows, the more sure it is that he knows everything.
Joyce Cary
#21. When tragedy comes like this, at first it is complete. You do not need to think it over, or decide what it means. For it is far ahead of you, and the very act of acknowledging it means letting it go. But then it comes round again - and it goes through you and is worse than before.
Benjamin Lytal
#22. Everything is 'just a story'. Tragedy, comedy, end of the world, what ever it's just a story. What matters is making sure it's heard.
Mira Grant
#23. Sometimes, when tragedy strikes, people give up hope that they can expect anything more from life, when the real quest is finding out what life expects from them.
Richard Paul Evans
#24. When we refuse to do what we are supposed to do at the right time, the consequence is that of pain and tragedy.
Sunday Adelaja
#25. It is clear looking at statistics of inventions, discoveries and fortune 500 companies, that it is not the believers that are managing the affairs of the earth. What a tragedy!!!
Sunday Adelaja
#26. The abduction of a child is a tragedy. No one can fully understand or appreciate what a parent goes through at such a time, unless they have faced a similar tragedy. Every parent responds differently. Each parent copes with this nightmare in the best way he or she knows how.
John Walsh
#27. I was sort of trained in drama. I went to theater school. I started on the stage. Comedy is absolutely an essential part of what we do as actors. But I think in the grand scheme of things, comedy was born from tragedy. First there was tragedy and then there were the comedies.
Alex O'Loughlin
#28. Time, the thing we can't beat back ... Yet, time is also what it takes to heal, what it takes for certain memory cells to die.
Maybe time doesn't heal. Maybe it doesn't even pass. We pass through time, and come out stunned, so rage, and memory, are blurred.
Kiana Davenport
#29. Life is neither comedy or tragedy, life is what you make of it.
Radha Mitchell
#30. What is it about someone else's tragedy that brings out this behavior in otherwise average people?
Phillip Hall
#31. I've only made short films and two features, which are very different. One is a surreal comedy, and the other is a period tragedy. I'm curious to know what misconceptions this could trigger
Sophie Barthes
#32. The tragedy of life is what dies in the hearts and souls of people while they live.
Albert Einstein
#33. It does no good to believe in what does not exist to the point one cannot focus on what is real. That would be the greatest tragedy of any 'conspiracy.'
John Ridley
#34. Here's one truth that perhaps your typical investment counselor would disagree with: if you're comfortably rich and someone else is getting richer faster than you by, for example, investing in risky stocks, so what?! Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is not a tragedy.
Charlie Munger
#35. To be what is called happy, one should have (1) something to live on, (2) something to live for, (3) something to die for.
The lack of one of these results in drama. The lack of two results in
tragedy.
Cyprian Norwid
#36. 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
#37. The tragedy in life to mourn over is the death of what lies within a person who is still alive. The death of a potential is a mess of destiny!
Israelmore Ayivor
#38. There is a saying in Tibetan, 'Tragedy should be utilized as a source of strength.'
No matter what sort of difficulties, how painful experience is, if we lose our hope, that's our real disaster.
Dalai Lama XIV
#39. Time brings an end to everything. We should not mistake for a tragedy what is no more than the passage of time.
Robert Breault
#40. If humor is not present, I tend to be concerned about the artist, or distrusting of what they're presenting - unless there is an obvious tragedy being talked about.
Scott Avett
#41. The tragedy of life is not so much what
men suffer, but rather what they miss.
Thomas Carlyle
#42. Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavour consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#43. It is God who enables us to return to life after tragedy-not by eradicating all suffering but by giving us the strength and the courage to heal what we can heal.
Naomi Levy
#44. 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
#45. I just try to write what I think would really happen, and with grief and tragedy, there are these naturally occurring moments of levity and humor and absurdity. I think that's what life is really like. Sadness gets interrupted, and happiness gets interrupted.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#46. The greatest Tragedy of life is not death but what dies within us when we are still alive
Norman
#47. Her entire existence is trying to figure out what her life is supposed to be while her heart breaks a little bit everyday over the tragedy of being alive.
Arlaina Tibensky
#48. The tragedy of life is not death but what we let die inside of us while we live.
Norman Cousins
#49. The world is not what it is supposed to be. We are tragically off course.
Bryant McGill
#50. Anne gave a little giggle. 'Oh what a tragedy Queen! You can smile while your heart is breaking because you are a woman, and a courtier and a Howard. That's three reasons for being the most deceitful creature on God's earth.
Philippa Gregory
#51. What a tragic realm this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don't know it; they think they are free because they have never been free, and do not understand what it means.
Philip K. Dick
#52. What is the biggest tragedy you wouldn't be conscious of? Letting life pass you by. Living like a starfish, clinging to your one unchanging colorless rock.
Julia Glass
#53. Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man's recognition of hisown negative potential
with his sense of what he is capable of.
Joseph Brodsky
#54. Tragic deaths aren't avoidable. That's what Ezra said outside Sam's wake, and even though--to use Foster's phrasing--I didn't know anything about anything, I felt in this moment that Ezra was wrong. What often makes something tragic is that it can be avoided.
Emma Mills
#55. The only thing you've got in this world is what you can sell.
Arthur Miller
#56. I knew what is was like to have people stare at you with pity. For everyone's gaze to follow you through the hallways as though you were marked by tragedy and no longer belonged. And I could understand why she hadn't wanted that.
Robyn Schneider
#57. An event is never just what it is in itself and nothing more. It's what goes on around it, at the same time, that makes it - potentially - a tragic situation.
You have to have been exposed to this, at least once, to understand it.
Jacques Yonnet
#58. Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.
Julian Barnes
#59. 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
#60. Beliefs kill more humans than all diseases and weapons combined, an inevitable tragedy because it's the hardest thing there is, knowing what to believe.
Jule Owen
#61. There are three sayings I live by, and one of them is 'The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.' That's what losing a job is like. That's why we have to bring them back.
Ken Hendricks
#62. Well, I think the great tragedy in American politics is what is legal, not what is illegal.
Jack Abramoff
#63. The tragedy of the Book of Mormon is not what became of the Nephites but what the Nephites became.
Hugh Nibley
#64. There is no tragedy, only the unavoidable. Everything has its reason for being: you only need to distinguish what is temporary from what is lasting.
Paulo Coelho
#65. What to do when adversity strikes? There is only one thing to do. Stand steady and see it through. Stay steadfast, constant, and true. The real tragedy in the whirlwinds of life comes only when we allow them to blow us off our true course.
David S. Baxter
#66. It is not triumph which defines a man, but tragedy. Triumph always brings out the best in men, but tragedy shows us what we are made of.
Jocelyn Murray
#67. Storytelling is a landscape, and tragedy is comedy is drama. It simply depends on how you frame what you're seeing.
Lauren Groff
#68. I'm glad you think this is funny," he says. "Come on," I say. "Tragedy is funny." "Are we in a tragedy?" he asks, smiling broadly now. "Of course. Isn't that what life is? We all die at the end.
Nicola Yoon
#69. The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives - the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in yourself.
Norman Cousins
#70. The tragedy of too many people is that they cannot allow happiness just to be there; they cannot leave it alone. Their sense of who they are and of what their destiny is cannot accommodate happiness. So they are drive to find ways to sabotage it.
Nathaniel Branden
#71. The greatest tragedy in life is not to die, it is to live as if dead, to let the life within us wither. Toward what goal or achievement are we striving in life? This is the important question to ask ourselves.
Daisaku Ikeda
#72. The tragedy in a man's life is what dies inside of him while he lives.
Henry David Thoreau
#73. One hardly need believe that the events in your life are actually planned as bolts from the blue, sent special delivery from a deity who is testing and training you like a lab rat! And that is what we are saying when we fretfully ask, What can God be trying to teach me through this tragedy?
Robert M. Price
#74. What then is tragedy? In the Elizabethan period it was assumed that a play ending in death was a tragedy, but in recent years we have come to understand that to live on is sometimes far more tragic than death.
George Pierce Baker
#76. What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.
Mario Puzo
#77. The tragedy is that everyone thinks they already have goals. But what they really have are hopes and wishes.
Brian Tracy
#78. The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.
Arthur Miller
#79. The tragedy of life is when you do not know what to do with time
Sunday Adelaja
#80. When it happens to you it's a national tragedy - Why aren't the papers reporting this? you wonder. Only when it happens to someone else do you realize what a dull story it really is.
David Sedaris
#81. An Abyss is a deep and terrible chasm. What's a chasm? A deep gash in the rocks.
Diane Samuels
#82. 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
#83. That's all religion is
some principle you believe in ... man has accomplished far more miracles than the God he invented. What a tragedy it is to invent a God and then suffer to keep him King.
Rod Steiger
#84. Receive what cheer you may. The night is long that never finds the day.
William Shakespeare
#85. 'The Help' sheds light on a certain truth in America, but the tragedy is if we don't get a chance to contrast it with other points of views. 'The Butler' does that, 'Red Tails' does that and that's what '96 Minutes' does.
David Oyelowo
#86. The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives. -Albert Schweitzer
Albert Schweitzer
#87. What the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending.
William Dean Howells
#88. Life is a tragedy, one way or another. What is certain is that you die.
Anne Rice
#89. We just sent our condolences to the President of the United States and the American people on what is a terrible, terrible tragedy.
Helen Clark
#90. Vaccines [measles] have been proven to be safe, and what happens if you don't take vaccines is children get measles and die. So the anti-vaccine crowd has, you know, kept measles around in a way that - you know, it's a tragedy, because so much is done to make sure these things are safe.
David Oshinsky
#91. 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
#92. What I have in ample supply here is children who've lost their childhood. But the tragedy is that these are the lucky ones.
Khaled Hosseini
#93. Tragedy is the difference between what is and what could have been.
Abba Eban
#94. Isn't that the tragedy of growing up though? One day you wake up and realize that everything you are and everything you feel is not much different from what everyone else feels.
Nadine Rose Larter
#95. 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
#96. When the news you don't want to hear is looming before you like Everest, two things can happen. Tragedy can run you through like a sword, or it can become your backbone. Either you fall apart and sob, or you say, 'Right. What's next?
Jodi Picoult
#97. For what else is tragedy than the portrayal in tragic verse of the sufferings of men who have attached high value to external things? [27]
Epictetus
#98. The greatest lesson I've learned in life is "Who knows what's good or bad?" Things come along that you really want, and they turn out to be the worst thing in the world. And some of the worst tragedies that you can conceive turn out to be the best things, the exact medicine you need in that moment.
Denzel Washington
#99. And the greatest tragedy of our age is we don't listen to our consciences. We don't say what we think. We feel one thing and do another.
Vasily Grossman
#100. It is the tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn't know - and the less a man knows, the more sure he is that he knows everything.
Joyce Cary
