Tragedy Quotes

You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Tree, Breaks, Bending

Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.
Clarence Darrow

Children, Doubt, Teaching

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
Steven Weinberg

Life, Human, Understand

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.
Judy Collins

Life, True, Suffering

Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.
Elie Wiesel

Sometimes, Answer, Asked

I love John Irving's stuff. It's that marriage of comedy and tragedy. It's really terrific.
Jeff Bridges

Love, Marriage, Comedy

The mark of a good marriage is partnership and continuing to feel inspired by your spouse. I had that with Tao. But the end is not necessarily the tragedy. Staying in a relationship that is no longer working is the tragedy. Living unhappily - that's the tragedy.
Olivia Wilde

Marriage, Good, End

The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
Jean Cocteau

Through, Worst, Poet

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

Different, Genius, Angle

Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.
Lenny Bruce

Time, Give, Enough

Tragedy is a literary concept.
David Hockney

Concept, Literary

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

Moment, Comedy, Eternity

We, therefore, here in Britain stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world.
Tony Blair

Evil, Friends, Here

Comedy is tragedy plus time.
Carol Burnett

Time, Comedy, Plus

The subject of a good tragedy must not be realistic.
Pierre Corneille

Good, Realistic, Subject

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.
Vaclav Havel

Life, Him, Less

Tragedy is a hell of a teacher. It's much too strict, but it's a hell of a teacher.
Harlan Coben

Teacher, Hell, Strict

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

Life, Point, Call

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.
Seth Graham-Smith

Education, Money, Nothing

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.
Horace Walpole

Nature, Great, Poetry

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
Alfred North Whitehead

Life, Youth, Deepest

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?
Joni Mitchell

Happiness, Understand, Why

In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy, really, and loss.
Joni Mitchell

Music, Writing, Gift

People marry for a variety of reasons and with varying results. But to marry for love is to invite inevitable tragedy.
James Branch Cabell

Love, Results, Marry

Look, we live in a very dangerous world. We know there are people who want to take away our freedoms. New Yorkers probably know that as much if not more than anybody else after the terrible tragedy of 9/11.
Michael Bloomberg

Live, After, Away

It isn't fate but fecklessness that has shoved Sarah Palin to the sidelines of national politics. The real tragedy is that she's taken a lot of other serious Republican women with her.
Dee Dee Myers

Politics, Women, Real

I've never had a very closely connected family. My parents split up when I was young and I was living with my mom for a little while, then I was kind of just on my own really young. It wasn't some kind of global tragedy, it was just never really a very close-knit family. So there was support in the sense that they didn't stand in my way.
Ani DiFranco

Family, Mom, Parents

Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting.
Jonathan Safran Foer

Great, Parenting, Real

I feel like there are women who are genuinely born to be mothers, and women who are born to be aunties, and women who really probably not should be allowed near children. The tragedy that happens is when any one of those women ends up in the wrong category.
Elizabeth Gilbert

Women, Children, Wrong

Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.
Jane Smiley

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