Tragedy Quotes - Page 34

• I like a man who likes to see a fine barn as well as a good tragedy.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Barns, Likes

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1963). “The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.138, Harvard University Press

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• It is doubtless a vice to turn one's eyes inward too much, but I am my own comedy and tragedy.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Eye, Vices, Inward

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joel Porte (1982). “Emerson in His Journals”, p.98, Harvard University Press

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• Unsaintly saints are the tragedy of Christianity.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Saint, Christianity

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• Tragedy turns into comedy when you watch your own drama and realizing it as a mind-created fiction designed to create you a sense of identity.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Drama, Mind, Identity

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• It is no tragedy to do ungrateful people favors, but it is unbearable to be indebted to a scoundrel.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Ungrateful People, Favors, Unbearable

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• It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.

  Marcel Proust

  People, Mind, Showcase

  Marcel Proust (2015). “Remembrance of Things Past: The Sweet Cheat Gone”, p.123, Marcel Proust

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• It is a tragedy that most of us die before we have begun to live.

  Erich Fromm

  Death, Dies

  Erich, Fromm (1986). “For the love of life”

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• It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.

  Oscar Wilde

  Dog, Artist, New Start

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.824, GENERAL PRESS

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• Laughter and weeping, the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy, mark the extremes of a continuous spectrum; both provide channels for the overflow of emotion; both are

  Arthur Koestler

  Laughter, Greek, Comedy

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• This is my genre...the happiness, tragedies, and the sorrows of mankind as realized in the teeming black ghetto.

  Jacob Lawrence

  Ghetto, Black, Sorrow

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• A senseless tragedy remains forever tragic, but it is up to us whether it remains forever senseless.

  Robert Breault

  Perspective, Forever, Tragic

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• Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren't so many of them left. Think it over... no more syphilis, no more clap, no more typhoid... antibiotics have taken half the tragedy out of medicine.

  Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  Taken, Thinking, Medicine

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• Life is a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for a while and then act our part in it.

  Jonathan Swift

  Life, Life Is, Spectators

  Jonathan Swift (1998). “The Sayings of Jonathan Swift”, p.18, Gerald Duckworth & Co

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• A tragic writer does not have to believe in God, but he must believe in man.

  Joseph Wood Krutch

  Believe, Men, Doe

  1929 The Modern Temper,'The Tragic Fallacy'.

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• Tragedy dramatizes human life as potentiality and fulfillment. Its virtual future, or Destiny, is therefore quite different from that created in comedy. Comic Destiny is Fortune - what the world will bring, and the man will take or miss, encounter or escape; tragic Destiny is what the man brings, and the world will demand of him. That is his Fate.

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Destiny, Different, Comedy

  "Feeling and Form". Book by Susanne Katherina Langer, ch. 19, 1953.

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• I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Art, Italian, Turkeys

  Edgar Allan Poe (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Illustrated)”, p.2141, Delphi Classics

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• Tragedy, no matter how sad, becomes boring to those not caught in its addictive caress.

  Maya Angelou

  Matter, Boring, Caught

  Maya Angelou (2012). “The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou”, p.894, Modern Library

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• If Romeo and Juliet make a tragedy of it nowadays, they have only to blame their own mismanagement, for the world is with them as it has never been before, and all sensible fathers and mothers know it.

  Richard Le Gallienne

  Inspiring, Mothers Day, Father

  Richard Le Gallienne (1915). “Vanishing Roads, and Other Essays”

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• Tragedy and comedy are simply questions of value; a little misfit in life makes us laugh; a great one is tragedy and cause for expression of grief.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Grief, Expression, Laughing

  Elbert Hubbard (2009). “Love, Life & Work: Being a Book of Opinions Reasonably Good-Natured Concerning How to Attain the Highest Happiness for One's Self with the Least Possible Harm to Others”, p.104, The Floating Press

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• One can play comedy, two are required for melodrama, but a tragedy demands three.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Play, Two, Three

  Elbert Hubbard, Bert Hubbard (1923). “Selected writings of Elbert Hubbard: his mintage of wisdom, coined from a life of love, laughter and work”

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• Europe has what we [Americans] do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.

  James A. Baldwin

  Europe, Needs, Limits

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• The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute.

  Rebecca Harding Davis

  War, Army, Ideas

  Rebecca Harding Davis (1904). “Rebecca Harding Davis: Writing Cultural Autobiography”, p.76, Vanderbilt University Press

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• Luck or tragedy, some people get runs. Then of course there are those who divide it even, good and bad, but we never hear of them. Such a life doesn't demand attention. Only the people who get the good or bad runs.

  John Steinbeck

  Running, Fate, People

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• I had discovered that love might be a pastime as well as a tragedy, and I gave myself to it with pagan innocence.

  Isadora Duncan

  Love, Might, Innocence

  Isadora Duncan (2013). “My Life (Revised and Updated)”, p.224, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The pursuit of Fashion is the attempt of the middle class to co-opt tragedy. In adopting the clothing, speech, and personal habits of those in straitened, dangerous, or pitiful circumstances, the middle class seeks to have what it feels to be the exigent and nonequivocal experiences had by those it emulates.

  David Mamet

  Fashion, Class, Speech

  David Mamet (1986). “Writing in restaurants”, Viking Adult

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