Tragedy famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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The difference between tragedy and comedy: Tragedy is something awful happening to somebody else, while comedy is something awful happening to somebody else.
-- Aaron Allston -
Tragedy is the difference between what is and what could have been.
-- Abba Eban -
Men of success meet with tragedy. It was the will of God that I won the Olympics, and it was the will of God that I met with my accident. I accepted those victories as I accept this tragedy. I have to accept both circumstances as facts of life and live happily.
-- Abebe Bikila -
Poetry, like jazz, is one of those dazzling diamonds of creative industry that help human beings make sense out of the comedies and tragedies that contextualize our lives.
-- Aberjhani -
She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life... As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.
-- Abraham Verghese -
Who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings? Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don’t know. The gamble of triumph or tragedy at this scale — and ultimately it is a gamble — demands an extraordinary payoff. The trade center towers could be the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world.
-- Ada Louise Huxtable -
The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations.
-- Adam Smith -
That is why most great love stories are tragedies.
-- Agatha Christie -
This is the tragedy and woe of the hour--that we neglect the most important One who could possibly be in our midst--the Holy Spirit of God. Then, in order to make up for His absence, we have to do something to keep up our own spirits.
-- Aiden Wilson Tozer -
A man by his sin may waste himself, which is to waste that which on earth is most like God. This is man's greatest tragedy and God's heaviest grief.
-- Aiden Wilson Tozer -
I like the tragedies way more than the comedies because they're so universal.
-- Alan Cumming -
The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that things are not mended again.
-- Alan Paton -
Small mistakes, the lack of care, little accidents, and somewhere a tipping point is passed and things go badly wrong. Expedition history brims with tragedies built out of incremental missteps.
-- Alan S. Kesselheim -
Life can be magnificent and overwhelming -- that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.
-- Albert Camus -
When love ceases to be tragic it is something else and the individual again throws himself in search of tragedy.
-- Albert Camus -
The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.
-- Albert Camus -
Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky -
Life's greatest tragedy is not that it will someday end, but that most only live to follow directions and sometimes we end up totally lost.
-- Alex Gaskarth -
Our street corners keep secrets, and our road signs only suggest, never deciding for us, never knowing if the destination to which they lead, is where we truely belong. Life's greatest tragedy is not that it will some day end, but that most of us just live to follow directions, and many times we end up totally lost.
-- Alex Gaskarth -
The eyes sparked a lot of things for me, it could be somebody remembering something they had witnessed or heard about, or it could be the person in the photograph that was experiencing a tragedy or it could also be the spectator looking on from a safe distance.
-- Alex Prager -
It is observable that the ladies frequent tragedies more than comedies; the reason may be, that in tragedy their sex is deified and adored, in comedy exposed and ridiculed.
-- Alexander Pope -
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 -
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
-- Alfred North Whitehead -
The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations.
-- Alfred North Whitehead -
The thing is to be happy,' he said. 'No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It's nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn't believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, you're just there, going along easy in the world.
-- Alice Munro -
You'll say I'm self-destructive I constructed all this tragedy. Go tell them all it's all my fault You'll tell them I was crazy . And anyway it's over now Nothing left to say.
-- Alicia Witt -
I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy
-- Alison Bechdel -
The tragedy of September 11th was so sudden, so enormous, and so horrendous, both in terms of lives lost and global consequences, that this country and the world went into immediate and prolonged shock.
-- Allen Klein -
Human life is a combination of tragedy and comedy. The shapes and designs that surround us are the music accompanying this tragedy and this comedy.
-- Alvar Aalto -
Words cannot fully express the devastation and horror caused by NTDs. Until now, these diseases have been hidden in the shadows, but working with the Global Network, I am focused on bringing this tragedy to the public eye.
-- Alyssa Milano -
To me, the tragedy about this whole image-obsessed society is that young girls get so caught up in just achieving that they forget to realize that they have so much more to offer the world.
-- America Ferrera -
When you go through tragedy, you can either let that destroy you and you become bitter and never let it go, or you can let it make you stronger and let it make you grow. And that's what I did. My lyrics are coming from a place that I want people to relate to and feel that they're not alone.
-- Amy Lee -
A person's tragedy does not make up their entire life. A story carves deep grooves into our brains each time we tell it. But we aren't one story. We can change our stories. We can write our own.
-- Amy Poehler -
To choose a writer for a friend is like palling around with your cardiologist, who might be musing as you talk to him that you are a sinking man. A writer's love for another writer is never quite free of malice. He may enjoy discussing your failures even more than you do. He probably sees you as tragic, like his characters - or unworthy of tragedy, which is worse.
-- Anatole Broyard -
The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide.
-- Andrea Dworkin -
It is a tragedy beyond the power of language to convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a standard of freedom for women: and all the women say it is so.
-- Andrea Dworkin -
Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural into some of his tragedies; he introduces ghosts, and witches who have supernatural knowledge.
-- Andrew Coyle Bradley -
In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of Shakespearean Tragedy.
-- Andrew Coyle Bradley -
A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. But it is clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from another side.
-- Andrew Coyle Bradley -
We cannot arrive at Shakespeare's whole dramatic way of looking at the world from his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton's way of regarding things, or at Wordsworth's or at Shelley's, by examining almost any one of their important works.
-- Andrew Coyle Bradley -
Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.
-- Angela Carter -
A broken heart is never a tragedy. Only untimely death is a tragedy.
-- Angela Carter -
It's every woman's tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators, in our time.
-- Angela Carter -
She wondered if maybe tragedy was what it took to make your heart capable of admitting a new member.
-- Ann Brashares -
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 -
Racism has been for everyone like a horrible, tragic car crash, and we've all been heavily sedated from it. If we don't come into consciousness of this tragedy, there's going to be a violent awakening we don't want. The question is, can we wake up?
-- Anna Deavere Smith -
Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.
-- Anne Carson -
Perhaps. But the firstborn of hope is tragedy.
-- Anne Fortier -
It's important to talk about loving yourself and looking at your tragedies and the stuff that makes you grow.
-- Anne Heche -
You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.
-- Annie Proulx -
On Twitter, when someone would die, I would write a joke. Or if there's a tragedy, I would write a joke and tweet it. That was my thing, and then at a certain point, people started demanding it.
-- Anthony Jeselnik -
Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
-- Antonin Artaud -
Syria has become the great tragedy of this century - a disgraceful humanitarian calamity with suffering and displacement unparalleled in recent history,
-- Antonio Guterres -
A tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself . . . with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.
-- Aristotle -
A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude. A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.
-- Aristotle -
Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.
-- Aristotle -
How would I behave in a situation that caused me to summon the essence of my character? The tragedy inspired me to test myself. I wanted to reveal to myself who I was: the kind of person who died, or the kind of person who overcame circumstances to help himself and others
-- Aron Ralston -
One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. However valuable-even necessary-that may have been in enforcing good behavior on primitive peoples, their association is now counterproductive. Yet at the very moment when they should be decoupled, sanctimonious nitwits are calling for a return to morals based on superstition.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Lack of something to feel important about is almost the greatest tragedy a man may have.
-- Arthur Ernest Morgan -
Laughter and weeping, the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy, mark the extremes of a continuous spectrum; both provide channels for the overflow of emotion; both are
-- Arthur Koestler -
The life of every individual is really always a tragedy, but gone through in detail, it has the character of a comedy.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
Comedy ages quicker than tragedy, to the extent that we can't know if the 10 commandments may originally have been 10 hilarious one-liners.
-- Arthur Smith -
I'm sure there are people who survive tragedy without humor, but I've never met any of them. Nor would I be particularly interested in writing about them if I did meet them.
-- Ayelet Waldman -
We've endured too many tragedies. And each time I learn the news I react not as a President, but as anybody else would - as a parent.
-- Barack Obama -
We're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.
-- Barack Obama -
One death is a tragedy; a thousand is a statistic.
-- Barbara Demick -
Money talks. It starts rumors about careers and complicity and speaks of the tragedies and triumphs of our social lives.
-- Barbara Kruger -
There is a point in portraying surface vulgarity where tragedy and comedy are very close.
-- Barbara Stanwyck -
The fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten.
-- Barbara Tuchman -
For those unfortunate enough to experience it, long-term unemployment - now, as in the 1930s - is a tragedy. And, for society as a whole, there is the danger that the productive capacity of a significant portion of the labour force will be impaired.
-- Barry Eichengreen -
The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach
-- Benjamin E. Mays -
The tragedy of this life is not failure, but low aim.
-- Benjamin E. Mays -
The tragedy of life is not found in failure but complacency. Not in you doing too much, but doing too little. Not in you living above your means, but below your capacity. It's not failure but aiming too low, that is life's greatest tragedy.
-- Benjamin E. Mays -
Life's Tragedy is that we get old to soon and wise too late.
-- Benjamin Franklin -
The cure for the Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner tragedies is not education or exposure. It's the Gospel. So, finally, I'M ENCOURAGED because the Gospel gives mankind hope,
-- Benjamin Watson -
Nuclear weapons will not be gotten rid of until the United States confronts the magnitude of the horror, the tragedy, and the long-term suffering of the victims
-- Bernard Lown -
Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.
-- Bernard Malamud -
We dedicate ourselves to working with our neighbors, near and far, day in and day out, to building that peaceful society in which the tragedies we have known are a bad memory and a continuing warning.
-- Betty Williams -
We had a national tragedy this week, and the President of the United States and Sarah Palin both made speeches on the same day. Obama came out against lunatics with guns, she gave the rebuttal.
-- Bill Maher -
You always hear that tragedies put sports in perspective, that they prove we shouldn't care this much about the successes and failures of a bunch of wealthy strangers. I'm going the other way - sometimes, sports put everything else in perspective.
-- Bill Simmons -
I have been asked hundreds of times in my life why God allows tragedy and suffering. I have to confess that I really do not know the answer totally, even to my own satisfaction. I have to accept, by faith, that God is sovereign, and He is a God of love and mercy and compassion in the midst of suffering.
-- Billy Graham -
It's a tragedy that modernity has released this Ebola beast into the world. It renders humans untouchable, and that's sickening. The international response so far has been scandalous. China has delivered f**k all.
-- Bob Geldof -
There are a lot of questions I keep asking myself about why I do comedy. I guess I laugh to keep from crying. And I guess if you ever get me crying, I might not stop. This is the way I look at tragedy or else I'll cry.
-- Bob Newhart -
It's my belief that history is a wheel. 'Inconstancy is my very essence,'? says the wheel. Rise up on my spokes if you like but don't complain when you're cast back down into the depths. Good times pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it's also our hope. The worst of times, like the best, are always passing away.
-- Boethius -
The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.
-- Brenda Ueland -
Tragedy is that our attention centers on what people are not, rather than on what they are and who they might become.
-- Brennan Manning -
Well I would say that we're regular people first of all and we're normal and it's obvious by some of the things that have happened just because our name is famous we're not immune to tragedy.
-- Brett Favre -
...the tragedy of consumerism: one acquires more and more things without taking the time to ever see and know them, and thus one never truly enjoys them. One has without truly having. The consumer is right-there is pleasure to be had in good things, a sacred and almost unspeakable pleasure, but the consumer wrongly thinks that one finds this pleasure by having more and more possessions instead of possessing them more truly through grateful contemplation. And here we are, living in an economy that perpetuates this tragedy.
-- Brian D. McLaren -
A formula for comedy is comedy equals tragedy plus time. A difficult or uncomfortable situation takes place, and then you laugh about it later down the road.
-- Brian Regan -
The tragedy is that everyone thinks they already have goals. But what they really have are hopes and wishes.
-- Brian Tracy -
Lord, spit on our eyes that we may see, how to wake up from this tragedy.
-- Bruce Cockburn -
I have realized that the moon did not have to be full for us to love it. That we are not tragedies stranded here beneath it.
-- Buddy Wakefield -
Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.
-- Buster Keaton -
The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.
-- C. S. Lewis
