Tragedy Quotes

As a rule, we don't like to feel to sad or lonely or depressed. So why do we like music (or books or movies) that evoke in us those same negative emotions? Why do we choose to experience in art the very feelings we avoid in real life?Aristotle deals with a similar question in his analysis of tragedy. Tragedy, after all, is pretty gruesome. […] There's Sophocles's Oedipus, who blinds himself after learning that he has killed his father and slept with his mother. Why would anyone watch this stuff? Wouldn't it be sick to enjoy watching it? […] Tragedy's pleasure doesn't make us feel "good" in any straightforward sense. On the contrary, Aristotle says, the real goal of tragedy is to evoke pity and fear in the audience. Now, to speak of the pleasure of pity and fear is almost oxymoronic. But the point of bringing about these emotions is to achieve catharsis of them - a cleansing, a purification, a purging, or release. Catharsis is at the core of tragedy's appeal.

They are tragic,' said Vetinari, 'and we laugh at their tragedy as we laugh at our own. The painted grin leers out at us from the darkness, mocking our insane belief in order, logic, status, the reality of reality. The mask knows that we are born on the banana skin that leads only to the open manhole cover of doom, and all we can hope for are the cheers of the crowd.

My mood depends on the girl whom I love, but she is like a wildest hurricane, drifting shore to shore.

Let me here remind you that the essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama. This remorseless inevitableness is what pervades scientific thought. The laws of physics are the decrees of fate.

JOCASTA:So clear in this case were the oracles,so clear and false. Give them no heed, I say;what God discovers need of, easilyhe shows to us himself.

A writer's duty is to draw a picture that expresses more inner beauty, deeper anxiety, and more complex tragedy than a real character ever can.

All I could think about as I stood there was that sometimes life gave you a tragedy that burned everything you knew to the ground and changed you completely. But somehow, if you really wanted to, you could learn how to hold your breath as you made your way through the smoke left in its wake and you could keep going. And sometimes, sometimes, you could grow something beautiful from the ashes that were left behind. If you were lucky.

All things die,' she told him. Such a truism, it was the trite utterance of any street-corner philosopher, but coming from Inaspe Raimm it sounded different. 'All things reach the end of their journey, be they trees, insects, people or even principalities. All things die so that others may take their place. To die is no tragedy. The tragedy is dying with a purpose unfulfilled.

Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. 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. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation.

They don’t know I only speak in runaway train stationsand everybody is always a few minutes too late to the platform.No one has ever gotten the chance to get too closebecause it is never romantic to fuck the girl who makes love to her own sadness every single night.

If the sky falls, there'll be a bigger sky behind it.

What troubled people especially was not just the tragedy--or even the needlessness--but the element of fate in it all. If the Titanic had heeded any of the six ice messages on Sunday . . . if ice conditions had been normal . . . if the night had been rough or moonlit . . . if she had seen the berg 15 second sooner--or 15 seconds later . . . if she had hit the ice any other way . . . if her watertight bulkheads had been one deck higher . . . if she had carried enough boats . . . if the Californian had only come. Had any one of these "ifs" turned out right, every life might have been save. But they all went against her--a classic Greek tragedy.

There's a problem with marrying up. You always worry that someday they'll see through you and leave. Or, worse yet, someone better will come along and take her. In my case, it wasn't someone. And it wasn't something better.

Are you keeping up your good studies at school and working as hard as you always did?

It would cost you a groaning to take off my edge.

In the nights though, I couldn't help but weave the golden cloth of my dreams. Each stitch from heart to thought, and thought to heart, was painful to bear, even if it was joyous at times. Because each thread was fraught with the fears of being broken midway, lost and never found again.

Come what come may, time and the hour run through the roughest day.

I have not broken your heart - you have broken it - and in breaking it, you have broken mine ... I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer - but yours! How can I?

Tragedy is born of myth, not morality. Prometheus and Icarus are tragic heroes. Yet none of the myths in which they appear has anything to do with moral dilemmas. Nor have the greatest Greek tragedies. If Euripides is the most tragic of the Greek playwrights, it is not because he deals with moral conflicts but because he understood that reason cannot be the guide of life.

Dark circles under my eyes sink deeper and deeper into my skull, in contrast to my pale skin there is an undeniable resemblance to a fresh corpse.

There was a certain untamed energy about the west of Ireland – full of tragedy and struggle, sown with the flesh of the departed.

Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.

I saw the destruction of Dresden. I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, that's the soul seeking some relief.

We cannot institutionalize helping the "victims" of personal disasters.

The ring which you are holding, my friend, is identical to that one. I had it cut according to the model of the king's ring, and damascened in Spain. The original is still in the Escorial; it would have been pleasant to steal it, for I easily acquire the instincts of a thief when I am in a museum, and I always find objects which have a history - especially a tragic history - uniquely attractive. I am not an Englishman for nothing - but that which is easily enough accomplished in France is not at all practical in Spain: the museums there are very secure.

Hope? Hope is not the absence of tragedy, my friend. It is the conviction that tragedy can be endured. Hope is the spark in you that is not subdued in the face of the vast and callous indifference of the universe. Hope is that which is not shattered by hardship. Hope is the urge to fight what is wrong even when you know it will destroy you. Hope is the decision to love and need someone knowing that they will one day die. For me to promise that there are no obstacles would be the cruelest lie I could possibly tell. That lie is not hope. Hope is the will which needs no lies.

My mind is like a seaYou will only drown, If you think you can swimThere are things that devours me, No love can ever save me.

All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.

One of the greatest tragedies in life is to lose your own sense of self and accept the version of you that is expected by everyone else.

Death is only tragic if you have tragically wasted your life on meaninglessness.

Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . .

This world’s anguish is no different from the love we insist on holding back.

You are the storyteller and the editor of your book of life. So write tales of imagination, tragedy, and adventure and illustrate it with the colors of beauty.

He hadn't known her, didn't know her, of course. There wasn't the time.

So our virtuesLie in the interpretation of the time:And power, unto itself most commendable,Hath not a tomb so evident as a chairTo extol what it hath done.One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail;Rights by rights falter, strengths by strengths do fail.

To forget God's law is our tragedy.

... the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them the truth and because Jesus speaks them both...

The purpose of a writer is to show the beauty and tragedy of life in the reader's own mirror.

Every great tragedy forms a fertile soil in which a great recovery can take root and blossom, but only if you plant the seeds.

Therefore love moderately. Long love doth so. Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.

And those who only know the non-platonic love have no need to talk of tragedy. In such love there can be no sort of tragedy.

When I was twelve, my sixth-grade English class went on a field trip to see Franco Zeffirelli’s film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. From that moment forward I dreamed that someday I’d meet my own Juliet. I’d marry her and I would love her with the same passion and intensity as Romeo. The factthat their marriage lasted fewer than three days before they both were deaddidn’t seem to affect my fantasy. Even if they had lived, I don’t think theirrelationship could have survived. Let’s face it, being that emotionally aflame, sexually charged, and transcendentally eloquent every single second can really start to grate on a person’s nerves. However, if I could find someone to love just a fraction of the way that Montague loved his Capulet, then marrying her would be worth it.

All you need is one safe anchor to keep you grounded when the rest of your life spins out of control

You're the hunter, the warrior. You're stronger than anyone else here, that's your tragedy.

I think you’re magicians because you’re unhappy. A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength. Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.

That we cannot rise equal to situations when we are in them — that is the tragedy of life.

Whatever the response to loss and tragedy, the experience seems to boil down to one journey--searching for Jesus.

Hands that never touch. Lips that never meet. The Almost Lovers, never to be.

At what point do you give up— decide enough is enough? There is only one answer really. Never.

The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.

We all look for meaning behind the tragedies that befall us. And sometimes the meaning is there. But sometimes, Master Bruce, terrible things just happen. No sinister plots. No secret societies. They just happen.

Biggest tragedy of life is when God ask us to glorify Him for our sakes but we choose to glorify self for satan's good.

People who mock incidents in history such as 9/11 or the Holocaust, referring to it all as a hoax or stirring up crazy conspiracy theories about it, should really stop and think about their words first, both because it shows flaws in logic and rationality to deny the obvious, and because to play pretend with incidents which killed innocent people, well, that's just like laughing in the face of tragedy. It's as if to say, "no, it's not horrible enough that these people were killed, oh no, we have to drag on these incidents by indulging in melodramatic fantasies!" In essence this means that those who lost loved ones not only have to live with these losses forever, they also have to live with the people who deny that any of it ever happened. It does no good to forget history or to deny it. All it does is desensitize people; it tells them that it's all just a game, which then risks the possibility of nobody taking it seriously enough to prevent something similar from happening again.

Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.

This was not a love story that ended in tragedy.This was a tragedy that ended in a love story.

When school vacates, your life vacates alongside. What a tragedy! What a waste of life!

The tragedy of Hetty is a ‘collide’ between the free will and male dominant society or nobility or religion. If her conduct is bad and cause of her tragedy then where is the tragedy of A.D. So as a moralist, GE demands a way for ‘Hetty like human beings’ in set society.

Life will hack off your head and shit down your neck every chance it gets. I've found that consuming drugs and booze, listening to music and always having an excuse in the best way to tip the scales.

Newspapers take peoples’ tragedies and force the world to experience all of it.

And when something awful happens, the goodness stands out even more ...