Tragedy Quotes

Perhaps catastrophe is the natural human environment, and even though we spend a good deal of energy trying to get away from it, we are programmed for survival amid catastrophe.

Germaine Greer

The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.

George Santayana

When any calamity has been suffered, the first thing to be remembered is how much has been escaped.

Samuel Johnson

What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?

George Eliot

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

Tom Stoppard

Man's extremity is God's opportunity.

John Flavel

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

Oscar Wilde

Receive what cheer you may. The night is long that never finds the day.

William Shakespeare

The bosses of our mass media, press, radio, film and television, succeed in their aim of taking our minds off disaster. Thus, the distraction they offer demands the antidote of maximum concentration on disaster.

Ernst Fischer

Every tragedy contains the seeds of triumph.

Scott Sorrell

Don't worry about the war. It's all over but the shooting.

Samuel Goldwyn

Don't worry about the war. It's all over but the shooting.

Samuel Goldwyn

Tragedy is an imitation of a whole and complete action of some amplitude. . . . Now a whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Aristotle

Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.

Antonin Artaud

Tragedy is a representation of action that is worthy of serious attention, complete in itself and of some magnitude - bringing about by means of pity and fear the purging of such emotions.

Aristotle

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

William Dean Howells

We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look.

Aldous Huxley

The popularity of disaster movies expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.

David Mamet

The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing in his life became him like leaving it.

William Shakespeare