Tragedy Quotations

Few delights can equal the presence of one whom we trust utterly.

The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities.

We owe it to the flood victims of New Orleans to give them truthful answers as to why this event took place and to assure our citizens that tragedies like this will never happen again.

Humor is merely tragedy standing on its head with its pants torn.

I trust people too much, and the other tragedy is I can't say no.

Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.

Everybody knows about Pearl Harbor. The thing that really fascinated me is that through this tragedy there was this amazing American heroism.

All writers are liars. They twist events to suit themselves. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story... They are terrible people.

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.

Lack of something to feel important about is almost the greatest tragedy a man may have.

I'm not so sure that people consider homelessness to be as important as, say, the Vietnam War. One should never even try to equate them because, of course, they're tragedies on both sides of the coin.

It always amazes me to think that every house on every street is full of so many stories; so many triumphs and tragedies, and all we see are yards and driveways.

The world is a mess. It seems that life gets harder on a personal level each and every day. Hug and kiss those you love every day. You never know when the tragedies of this world may visit your life.

Having experienced personally and through my family the tragedy of Chile is something always present in my memory. I do not want events of that nature ever to happen again, and I have dedicated an important part of my life to ensuring that and to the reunion of all Chileans.

Tragedy in life normally comes with betrayal and compromise, and trading on your integrity and not having dignity in life. That's really where failure comes.

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.

Things happen to everybody in the course of a lifetime. Relationships end, people die, tragedy befalls everyone. So everyone has this wealth of experience, and the older you are the more you have to draw on.

My heart goes out to victims and survivors of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy and to their families. This disaster will go down in history books as one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history.

In all natural disasters through time, man needs to attach meaning to tragedy, no matter how random and inexplicable the event is.

It doesn't matter how much wisdom you have. If you don't have position, you have nothing. That's the tragedy of India.

Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.

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.

I wanted my new release 'Get Back Up' to benefit Haiti in their tragedy and I am blessed to use my music to help as your purchase becomes our gift.

I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.

Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.

Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it.

If we had a terrorist attack, the way the people respond is going to determine whether that attack is just a tragedy or whether that attack becomes an all-out disaster.

In a household tragedy, you are very much aware of being alone. It is something that is possible to grasp, and that is why it hurts so much. Because you are alone. I know a little about this.

When you close your eyes to tragedy, you close your eyes to greatness.

What the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending.

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

The tragedy of Eliot Spitzer is almost Greek: Ascendant son of wealth and privilege dedicates his life to social justice, warns of the corruption lurking among us, and falls victim to his inner demons at the very moment of vindication.

Abraham Lincoln comes from nothing, has no education, no money, lives in the middle of nowhere on the frontier. And despite the fact that he suffers one tragedy and one setback after another, through sheer force of will, he becomes something extraordinary: not only the president but the person who almost single-handedly united the country.

It is true that I have had heartache and tragedy in my life. These are things none of us avoids. Suffering is the price of being alive.

My bones are tired from all the tragedy in me.

In tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is a moment.

I have always felt comedy and tragedy are roommates. If you look up comedy and tragedy, you will find a very old picture of two masks. One mask is tragedy. It looks like its crying. The other mask is comedy. It looks like its laughing. Nowadays, we would say, How tasteless and insensitive. A comedy mask is laughing at a tragedy mask.

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.

The tragedy of life and of the world is not that men do not know God; the tragedy is that, knowing Him, they still insist on going their own way.

The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.

I always wanted to tell the story of how Pearl Jam is the story of lightning striking twice. As well as being the flipside of the classic rock tale where great promise ends in tragedy. This is where tragedy begins great promise.

Unfortunately, since the Sept. 11 tragedy, our business is not doing too well.

I've had at least my share of tragedy, but I have had far more than my share of happiness.

There's obviously a lot of tragedy in comedy; I really enjoy the paradox of what a really good comedy is.

There is no tragedy in missing a putt, no matter how short. All have erred in this respect.

What makes America great is that we can come together during times of national tragedy.

Money talks. It starts rumors about careers and complicity and speaks of the tragedies and triumphs of our social lives.

My positions on gun safety have remained consistent over the years, and have been on my website for years. Whether I'm in a tough re-election race, an easy re-election race, or if it isn't an election year, whether there's a high-profile tragedy in the news or otherwise, my position remains unchanged and on my website.

Society mends its wounds. And that's invariably true in all the tragedies, in the comedies as well. And certainly in the histories.

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

All lives have triumphs and tragedies, laughter and tears, and mine has been no different. What really matters is whether, after all of that, you remain strong and a comfort to your loved ones. I have tried to meet that test.

Being able to sing all these years has helped me handle life's tragedies.

Sometimes bad luck hits you like in an ancient Greek tragedy, and it's not your own making. When you have a plane crash, it's not your fault.

The tragedy is that so many have ambition and so few have ability

The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations.

I like to take these unusual characters and then make them as normal as possible, because we all know that the tragedy and the abnormal always hides itself behind the normal

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

Gay icons usually have some tragedy in their lives, but I've only had tragic haircuts and outfits.

Life is neither comedy or tragedy, life is what you make of it.

I sometimes wonder if the tragedies my family has suffered are a kind of karmic price for all the fame and fortune the Bee Gees have had.

Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death.

The worst tragedy that could have befallen me was my success. I knew right away that I was through - cast out.

We must stop criminalizing mental illness. It's a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States.

David Brinkley was an icon of modern broadcast journalism, a brilliant writer who could say in a few words what the country needed to hear during times of crisis, tragedy and triumph.

It's one of the great tragedies of our contemporary life in America, that families fall apart. Almost everybody has that in common.

Tragedy is a great storytelling form. It worked extremely well for Shakespeare. It worked extremely well for Jim Cameron with Titanic.

Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.

One of the tragedies of the Bush administration is that we went back to business as usual, make a deal with the Democrats, lets all be friends in Washington philosophy.

September 11 stands on its own as a terrible tragedy.

The difference between tragedy and comedy: Tragedy is something awful happening to somebody else, while comedy is something awful happening to somebody else.

Well, my definition of a tragedy is a clash between right and right.

Those who are believers in God find strength from their faith in the face of suffering. They are compelled to give sacrificially to help those in need. And they have the hope that comes from knowing that, with God by their side, the tragedy they are facing is never the final word.

'Greek Street' is a very strange beast. I think of it as 'The Long Good Friday' meets 'Agamemnon.' A way of using those fantastically rich stories from Greek tragedy to take a look at our world and to explore some of the things I think about this world.

Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.

This is the choice in life. You choose what is less bad. I don't particularly like Mr. Obama, but I think he is less bad for the world than Mr. Romney. It is a tragedy of life that both candidates did not lose the election. They would have deserved both to lose.

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.

You go down to Skid Row and you see literally hundreds of people and not just men, but women and children as well. It's really a tragedy that our society has come to that.

I don't understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions?

I would like to think that as a result of not just my own experiences, but at least being empathetic and compassionate about other people's experiences and plights and tragedies, that I am affected by it and learn from it.

My tragedy is that all I want is a dog, and yet I have been cursed with cats all my life.

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?

War is tragedy. The great war stories are tragedies. It's the failure of diplomacy. 'War and Peace,' 'A Farewell to Arms,' 'For Whom the Bell Tolls.' Those are some of the greatest tragedies.

I've always been drawn to discomfort and that limbo of unease you get between comedy and tragedy.

It is selfish to concern oneself with tragedies.

There is no tragedy more woeful than the victory of hate, nor any attainment so hopelessly barren as the sterility of that achievement; for hate is finality, and finality is the greatest evil which can happen in a world of movement.

It's important to talk about loving yourself and looking at your tragedies and the stuff that makes you grow.

I think it's the tragedy of our time that we're not aware of the affect of the manner in which we've adopted tools. Those tools have become who we are.

For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews. It can also be other people.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

The bells cease, and the power goes from me, and I descend again to the world of the living; and if in some foolish confiding moment I try to explain why I want to re-live those old days, to tear the Truth out of the past so that all men shall see plainly, perhaps someone will say to me, 'Oh, the War! A tragedy - best forgotten.'

To endure the cross is not tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ.

In all love stories the theme is love and tragedy, so by writing these types of stories, I have to include tragedy.

As a kid, I knew all of the dinosaurs. It's one of those tragedies that I've forgotten what dinosaurs are cool.

I'm a huge fan of Jack Lemmon, he was someone who managed to tread that line between comedy and tragedy and sometimes give very big performances, but they were never over-demonstrative and they were never not based on a kind of real truthful human being.

Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.

My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next.

I like the tragedies way more than the comedies because they're so universal.

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.

Life is a comedy when watching and a tragedy when experiencing. I try and share anything I have.