Tragedy Quotes

Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.

Jacques Barzun

Commonplace people dislike tragedy because they dare not suffer and cannot exult.

John Edward Masefield

Laughter is ever young, whereas tragedy, except the very highest of all, quickly becomes haggard.

Margaret Sackville

It's not the tragedies that kill us, it's the messes.

Dorothy Parker

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

Tragedy is like strong acid -- it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

Tragedy, he precieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.

George Orwell

The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives -- the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in yourself.

Norman Cousins

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

Edith Hamilton

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.

Leo Tolstoy

That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.

Thomas Carlyle

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst; the last is a real tragedy!

Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's F

The greatest tragedy in America is not the destruction of our natural resources, though that tragedy is great. The truly great tragedy is the destruction of our human resources by our failure to fully utilize our abilities, which means that most men and women go to their graves with their music still in them.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

I've come to realize that life is not a musical comedy, it's a Greek tragedy.

Billy Joel

A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again. No, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one's pocket for another meal.

Henry Miller

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

It is restful, tragedy, because one knows that there is no more lousy hope left. You know you're caught, caught at last like a rat with all the world on its back. And the only thing left to do is shout -- not moan, or complain, but yell out at the top of your voice whatever it was you had to say. What you've never said before. What perhaps you don't even know till now.

Jean Anouilh