Tragedy Quotes

There is no man so blessed that some who stand by his deathbed won't hail the occasion with delight.

~ Marcus Aurelius

CHORUS:You that live in my ancestral Thebes, behold this Oedipus,- him who knew the famous riddles and was a man most masterful; not a citizen who did not look with envy on his lot- see him now and see the breakers of misfortune swallow him!Look upon that last day always. Count no mortal happy till he has passed the final limit of his life secure from pain.

~ Sophocles

TEIRESIAS:I tell you, king, this man, this murderer(whom you have long declared you are in search of,indicting him in threatening proclamationas murderer of Laius)- he is here.In name he is a stranger among citizensbut soon he will be shown to be a citizentrue native Theban, and he'll have no joyof the discovery: blindness for sightand beggary for riches his exchange,he shall go journeying to a foreign countrytapping his way before him with a stick.He shall be proved father and brother bothto his own children in his house; to herthat gave him birth, a son and husband both;a fellow sower in his father's bedwith that same father that he murdered.Go within, reckon that out, and if you find memistaken, say I have no skill in prophecy.

~ Sophocles

OEDIPUS: Upon the murderer I invoke this curse-whether he is one man and all unknown, or one of many- may he wear out his life in misery to miserable doom! If with my knowledge he lives at my hearthI pray that I myself may feel my curse. On you I lay my charge to fulfill all this for me, for the God, and for this land of ours destroyed and blighted, by the God forsaken.

~ Sophocles

To be the child of a conficted or reputed witch was inherently dangerous; in one pathetic case in Lorraine a young couple were both accused, and it emerged that they had decided to marry after attending an execution at the stake of their respective parents, 'so that they would have nothing to reproach one another with.

~ Robin Briggs

Tragedy was like that, a razor that sliced through time, severing the now from the before, incising the what-might-have-been from reality as cleanly as any surgeon's blade.

~ Kristin Hannah

We are rational creatures, Professor Jove explained; hope is irrational. We thus set ourselves up for one dispiriting fall after the next. Anger and depression are not diseases or dysfunctions or anomalies; they are perfectly rational responses to the myriad avoidable disappointments that begin in a thoroughly irrational hope.

~ Shalom Auslander

Tragedy is when someone ends up dead.Everything else is just a bump in the road.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

I am dwelling on things I love, even if a measure of tragedy is stitched into everything, if you follow the thread long enough

~ Sebastian Barry

It is at the family fireside, often under the shelter of the law itself, that the real tragedies of life are acted; in these days traitors wear gloves, scoundrels cloak themselves in public esteem, and their victims die broken-hearted, but smiling to the last. What I have just related to you is almost an every-day occurrence; and yet you profess astonishment.

~ Émile Gaboriau

In the West, it was believed that attitude and ambition saved you. In Africa, we had learned that no one was immune to capricious tragedy.

~ Alexandra Fuller

When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways - either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength. Thanks to the teachings of Buddha, I have been able to take this second way.

~ Dalai Lama

Those who are believers in God find strength from their faith in the face of suffering. They are compelled to give sacrificially to help those in need. And they have the hope that comes from knowing that, with God by their side, the tragedy they are facing is never the final word.

~ Adam Hamilton

And in this respect, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a tragedy, a clash between one very powerful, very convincing, very painful claim over this land and another no less powerful, no less convincing claim.

~ Amos Oz

There is no tragedy in missing a putt, no matter how short. All have erred in this respect.

~ Walter Hagen

I just try to write what I think would really happen, and with grief and tragedy, there are these naturally occurring moments of levity and humor and absurdity. I think that's what life is really like. Sadness gets interrupted, and happiness gets interrupted.

~ Kaui Hart Hemmings

I don't think it's possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

~ Christopher Hitchens

In high drama or high tragedy or anything, it's not really human unless there's some humor at the same time. And vice versa. So I guess I tend to gravitate towards projects which tread a dodgy tightrope between two things, which aren't really one or another.

~ Rebecca Hall

I'm sure there are people who survive tragedy without humor, but I've never met any of them. Nor would I be particularly interested in writing about them if I did meet them.

~ Ayelet Waldman

My own inclination is to skew towards humor. They say that some people view life as a comedy, others as a tragedy. Me? Comedy all the way.

~ Lauren Willig

Humor is merely tragedy standing on its head with its pants torn.

~ Irvin S. Cobb

We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward. In times of tragedy, of war, of necessity, people do amazing things. The human capacity for survival and renewal is awesome.

~ Isabel Allende

The Vietnam War was a great tragedy for our country. And it is now far enough away so that one can study without using the slogans to see what's really happened.

~ Henry Kissinger

Classical tragedy was the war between good and evil. We wanted evil to be defeated and good to be victorious. But the battle in modern tragedy is between good and good. And no matter which side wins, we'll still be heartbroken.

~ Asghar Farhadi

I used to think that the Civil War was our country's greatest tragedy, but I do remember that there were some redeeming features in the Civil War in that there was some spirit of sacrifice and heroism displayed on both sides. I see no redeeming features in Watergate.

~ Sam Ervin

I saw Kuwait many times before the war. I remember it as a beautiful place, full of very nice people, and it's a tragedy to see that somebody could set out to deliberately destroy a country the way the Iraqis have.

~ Norman Schwarzkopf

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

~ H. L. Mencken

The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

~ Edward Abbey

The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities.

~ Benjamin E. Mays

Tragedy in life normally comes with betrayal and compromise, and trading on your integrity and not having dignity in life. That's really where failure comes.

~ Tom Cochrane

'The White Woman on the Green Bicycle' is a love story mapped onto an unfolding political tragedy: that of the failure of the Independence era in Trinidad.

~ Monique Roffey

War is tragedy. The great war stories are tragedies. It's the failure of diplomacy. 'War and Peace,' 'A Farewell to Arms,' 'For Whom the Bell Tolls.' Those are some of the greatest tragedies.

~ David Mamet

Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

The political hero is not like the sports champion or matinee idol or daring inventor; like the war hero, he is born only of tragedy.

~ David Grann

Well I would say that we're regular people first of all and we're normal and it's obvious by some of the things that have happened just because our name is famous we're not immune to tragedy.

~ Brett Favre

The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

~ Thomas Huxley

Tragedy is a hell of a teacher. It's much too strict, but it's a hell of a teacher.

~ Harlan Coben

The world is a crazy, beautiful, ugly complicated place, and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy. The caravan keeps moving on, and the job of the longform writer or filmmaker or radio broadcaster is to stop - is to pause - and when the caravan goes away, that's when this stuff comes.

~ David Remnick

All I can tell you is that I've never met a woman who is not strong, but sometimes they don't let it out. Then there's a tragedy, and then all of a sudden that strength comes. My message is let the strength come out before the tragedy.

~ Diane Von Furstenberg

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