Tragedy Quotes

Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of DenmarkIs by a forged process of my deathRankly abused: but know, thou noble youth,The serpent that did sting thy father's lifeNow wears his crown.

William Shakespeare

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

Oscar Wilde

He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Humor is tragedy plus time.

Mark Twain

O honorable strumpet

William Shakespeare

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in suchan inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, theirabsolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lackof style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give usan impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that.Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements ofbeauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, thewhole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenlywe find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of theplay. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonderof the spectacle enthralls us.

Oscar Wilde

For there has never been a story nearly as tragic as the one of Frankenstein, except for that of Johnny Heart and his Francesca Valentine.

Rae Hachton

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

Steve Maraboli

There are no tragedies, just facts not recognized in time.

William D. Montapert

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

Stephen Vizinczey

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.

Ernest Hemingway

The love that follows us sometime is our trouble, which still we thank as love.

William Shakespeare

No man, proclaimed Donne , is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island ) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes-forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.

Neil Gaiman

It was no great tragedy being Judy Garland's daughter. I had tremendously interesting childhood years -- except they had little to do with being a child.

Liza Minnelli

The true end of tragedy is to purify the passions.

Aristotle

Down went the owners -- greedy men whom hope of gain allured: oh, dry the starting tear, for they were heavily insured.

W. S. Gilbert

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

E. M. Cioran

The earth is mankind's ultimate haven, our blessed terra firma. When it trembles and gives way beneath our feet, it's as though one of God's checks has bounced.

Gilbert Adair

A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take over every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh.

Stephen King

It is the custom on the stage: in all good, murderous melodramas: to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon. The hero sinks upon his straw bed, weighed down by fetters and misfortunes; and, in the next scene, his faithful but unconscious squire regales the audience with a comic song. We behold, with throbbing bosoms, the heroine in the grasp of a proud and ruthless baron: her virtue and her life alike in danger; drawing forth a dagger to preserve the one at the cost of the other; and, just as our expectations are wrought up to the highest pitch, a whistle is heard: and we are straightway transported to the great hall of the castle: where a grey-headed seneschal sings a funny chorus with a funnier body of vassals, who are free of all sorts of places from church vaults to palaces, and roam about in company, carolling perpetually.Such changes appear absurd; but they are not so unnatural as they would seem at first sight. The transitions in real life from well-spread boards to death-beds, and from mourning weeds to holiday garments, are not a whit less startling; only, there, we are busy actors, instead of passive lookers-on; which makes a vast difference. The actors in the mimic life of the theatre, are blind to violent transitions and abrupt impulses of passion or feeling, which, presented before the eyes of mere spectators, are at once condemned as outrageous and preposterous.

Charles Dickens