Tragedy Quotes - page 4

Man can and must prevent the tragedy of famine in the future instead of merely trying with pious regret to salvage the human wreckage of the famine, as he has so often done in the past. (Norman Borlaug)
The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst. View quote
Harry Emerson Fosdick
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. View quote
William Barclay
There's no greater tragedy than an equal intensity, in the same soul or the same man, of the intellectual sentiment and the moral sentiment. For a man to be utterly and absolutely moral, he has to be a bit stupid. For a man to be absolutely intellectual, he has to be a bit immoral. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast and largely hostile environment, in which we can achieve great things only by defying the gods; and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment. View quote
Norbert Wiener
The oppressive weight of disaster and tragedy in our lives does not arise from a high percentage of evil among the summed total of all acts, but from the extraordinary power of exceedingly rare incidents of depravity to inflict catastrophic damage, especially in our technological age when airplanes can become powerful bombs. (An even more evil man, armed only with a longbow, could not have wreaked such havoc at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.) View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
Tragedy should remain the right of human beings, subject, in their conditions or in their own nature, to the dire law of necessity. To them it is salvation and beatification. View quote
Karen Blixen
And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life. View quote
Antonin Artaud
No matter how devastating our struggles, disappointments, and troubles are, they are only temporary. No matter what happens to you, no matter the depth of tragedy or pain you face, no matter how death stalks you and your loved ones, the Resurrection promises you a future of immeasurable good. (Josh McDowell)
How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history - greater than the fall of empires - I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence. View quote
Emil Cioran
Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up. That he has to leave the nest, the security, and go out to do battle. He has to lose everything that is lovely and fight for a new loveliness of his own making, and it's a tragedy. A lot of people don't have the courage to do it. View quote
Helen Hayes
The greater the love, the greater the tragedy when it's over. View quote
Nicholas Sparks
Sometimes insanity is not a tragedy. Sometimes, it's a strategy for survival. Sometimes ... it's a triumph. View quote
Lois McMaster Bujold
Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
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, and you're just there, going along easy in the world. View quote
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. View quote
Alicia Witt
Divorce is the one human tragedy that reduces everything to cash. View quote
Rita Mae Brown
Suicide is not a blot on anyone's name; it is a tragedy. View quote
Kay Redfield Jamison
Marla's philosophy of life, she told me, is that she can die at any moment. The tragedy of her life is that she doesn't. (Chuck Palahniuk)
Disaster is a natural part of my evolution. Toward tragedy and dissolution. View quote
Chuck Palahniuk
The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means. View quote
Tom Stoppard
Death is a great tragedy...a profound loss...I don't accept it...I think people are kidding themselves when they say they are comfortable with death. View quote
Ray Kurzweil
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. View quote
Horace Walpole