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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"Our happiness is certainly mixed in with the tragedies of life. You have to find the lemonade. You have to find the silver lining in the middle of everything that happens in life."
"Life can be magnificent and overwhelming -- that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live."
"It was in Spain that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy."
"Tragedy is an imitation not of men but of a life, an action"
"Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously."
"It doesn't matter how much wisdom you have. If you don't have position, you have nothing. That's the tragedy of India."
"Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, but by people being fundamentally people."
"In Stalinism the tragedy is that its origin is some kind of radical emancipatory project. In the origins you had a kind of workers' uprising; the true enigma is how this project of emancipation went so wrong."
"If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment."
"Ordinary people shy away form negative situations, just as they do with failure. They do their best to avoid trouble. What great people do is the opposite. They are their best in these situations. They turn personal tragedy or misfortune - really anything, everything - to their advantage."
"Every woman becomes their mother. That's their tragedy. And no man becomes his. That's his tragedy."
"It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people."
"For this is the tragedy of man circumstances change, but he does not."
"I have found out that though the ways in which I can make myself useful are few, yet the work open to me is endless."
"The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we're passing one another without a look of recognition."
"Tragedy, no matter how sad, becomes boring to those not caught in its addictive caress."
"You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks."
"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically."
"Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain."
"The legalized liquor business is the tragedy of our civilization. Alcohol is the greatest and most blighting curse of our modern civilization. The liquor seller is simply and only a privileged malefactor - a criminal."
