Tragedy quotes
1.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside tragedy — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"It's amazing when tragedy strikes, how strong you find that you are, and I'd seen other people go through horrible things. And I just thought, "Wow, I would be a complete mess," and then suddenly when it happens, you realize you had more strength than you knew and it helps you to get through."
"he looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way."
"The tragedy is that Dell didn't win it - we lost it."
"It is a tragedy of the first magnitude that millions of people have ceased to use their hands as hands. Nature has bestowed upon us this great gift which is our hands. If the craze for machinery method continues, it is highly likely that a time will come when we shall be so incapacitated and weak that we shall begin to curse ourselves for having forgotten the use of the living machines given to us by God."
"LORD ILLINGWORTH: The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. MRS ALLONBY: And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy."
"As a kid, I knew all of the dinosaurs. It's one of those tragedies that I've forgotten what dinosaurs are cool."
"Tragedy should be utilized as a source of strength."
"The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents."
"To endure the cross is not tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ."
"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."
"We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look."
"Wherever comes man comes tragedy and comedy also."
"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."
"This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art."
"We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it - the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it."
"What terrible tragedies realism inflicts on people."
"...she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell."
"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."
"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. Not consciously, of course—for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him."
"Tragedy is one of the larger prices we pay for being alive. No one ever sidesteps tragedy. It is always there, shadowing us."
