Tragic Quotes - Page 22

• The White House begun airing their TV commercials to re-elect the president, and the John Kerry campaign is condemning his use of 9/11 in the ads. He said, it is unconscionable to use the tragic memory of a war in order to get elected, unless of course, it's the Vietnam War.

  Jay Leno

  Memories, War, Order

  10 Copy quote

• I think it would be a tragic statement of the universe if Java was the last language that swept through.

  James Gosling

  Thinking, Would Be, Java

  84 Copy quote

• The catastrophe of the tragic hero thus becomes the catastrophe of the fifth-century man; all his furious energy and intellectual daring drive him on to this terrible discovery of his fundamental ignorance - he is not the measure of all things but the thing measured and found wanting.

  Robert Fagles

  Hero, Ignorance, Men

  12 Copy quote

• I dont think tragic situations are necessarily devoid of beauty.

  James Nachtwey

  Photography, Thinking, Situation

  4 Copy quote

• Dogs have fleas; people have each other. We are born to die. Life is a continuing tragic comedy. Everything and everyone we love suffers. Anybody who doesn't see that has not grown up and known life.

  Frederick Lenz

  Dog, People, Suffering

  6 Copy quote

• We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practice the very opposite of the democratic creed.... This strange dichotomy, this agonizing gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man's earthly pilgrimage.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Commitment, Opposites, Practice

  Martin Luther King Jr. (1963). “Strength to Love”

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• To persuade thinking persons in Eastern Europe that Central American Marxists - the Sandinistas, the guerillas in El Salvador - are in absurd and tragic error is not difficult. Poles and Czechs and Hungarians can hardly believe, after what they experienced under socialism, that other human beings would fall for the same bundle of lies, half-truths, and distortions. Sadly, however, illusion is often sweeter to human taste than reality. The last marxist in the world will probably be an American nun.

  Michael Novak

  Lying, War, Fall

  16 Copy quote

• To joke in the face of danger is the supreme politeness, a delicate refusal to cast oneself as a tragic hero.

  Edmond Rostand

  Hero, Faces, Danger

  Edmond Rostand, Howard Thayer Kingsbury (2004). “Cyrano de Bergerac”, p.205, Simon and Schuster

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Most of us go through life praying a little, planning a little, jockeying for position, hoping but never being quite certain of anything, and always secretly afraid that we will miss the way. This is a tragic waste of truth and never gives rest to the heart.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Heart, Giving, Missing

  Aiden Wilson Tozer (1965). “The Knowledge of the Holy”, p.69, Fig

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• ...the wonderful poems interpreting with equal magic the romance of strange lands and times, or the modern soul, naked and unashamed, as if clothed in its own complexity; the humorous-tragic questionings of the universe; the delicious travel-pictures and fantasies; the lucid criticisms of art, and politics, and philosophy, informed with malicious wisdom, shimmering with poetry and wit.

  Israel Zangwill

  Art, Philosophy, Humorous

  Israel Zangwill (1908). “Dreamers of the Ghetto”, p.551, Library of Alexandria

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• My life's not tragic at all. How many guys do you know who are bankrupt and just bought a $3 million house and are getting ready to get $6 million more?

  Mike Tyson

  Boxing, House, Guy

  "Tyson: 'My whole life has been a waste'" by Jon Saraceno, usatoday30.usatoday.com. June 2, 2005.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Yes, yes: Taking out Saddam Hussein means war, and war is bad for children and other living things. I went to grade school in the 1970s, and I recall the poster. But there are times when war is not only a tragic and unavoidable necessity, but also good for children and other living things.

  Dan Savage

  Children, War, School

  4 Copy quote

• Contrary to what some folks would have us believe, it is not tragic, even if undesirable, for a person to leave a liberal arts education not having read major works from this canon. Their lives are not ending. And the exciting dimension of knowledge is that we can learn a work without formally studying it. If a student graduates without reading Shakespeare and then reads or studies this work later, it does not delegitimize whatever formal course of study that was completed.

  Bell Hooks

  Art, Believe, Reading

  4 Copy quote

• She was a natural blonde, with delicate hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives.

  Michael Chabon

  Girl, Eye, Delicate Life

  Michael Chabon (2011). “Wonder Boys”, p.192, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents has been always tragic, chiefly as an almost indecent excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carion.

  Henry Adams

  Mind, President, Firsts

  4 Copy quote

• A tragic life is romantic when it happens to somebody else.

  Charles M. Schulz

  Tragedy, Life Is, Happens

  9 Copy quote

• There's another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. [...] For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That's what hate does.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Hate, Love You, Thinking

  "Loving Your Enemies". Speech delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, November 17, 1957.

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• A box of new crayons! Now they’re all pointy, lined up in order, bright and perfect. Soon they’ll be a bunch of ground down, rounded, indistinguishable stumps, missing their wrappers and smudged with other colors. Sometimes life seems unbearably tragic.

  Bill Watterson

  Order, Color, Perfect

  22 Copy quote

• I'm pretty good with languages. I know a bit of French and actually want to live in France some day so that I can get fluent. I think it'd be tragic to go through life only knowing one language.

  Juliana Hatfield

  Thinking, Knowing, Want

  4 Copy quote

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

  Robert Breault

  Perspective, Forever, Tragedy

  5 Copy quote

• There can be no doubt that this possessive clinging to things is one of the most harmful habits in the [christian] life. Because it is so natural, it is rarely recognized for the evil that it is. But its outworkings are tragic.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Christian, Evil, Doubt

  5 Copy quote

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

  Joseph Wood Krutch

  Believe, Men, Tragedy

  1929 The Modern Temper,'The Tragic Fallacy'.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We scientists, whose tragic destination has been to help in making the methods of annihilation more gruesome and more effective, must consider it our solemn and transcendent duty to do all in our power in preventing these weapons from being used for the brutal purpose for which they were invented.

  Albert Einstein

  Science, Purpose, Weapons

  Albert Einstein (2016). “The Albert Einstein Collection: Essays in Humanism, The Theory of Relativity, and The World As I See It”, p.25, Open Road Media

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I (God) will leave man to make the fateful guess, Will leave him torn between the no and yes, Leave him unresting till he rests in me, Drawn upward by the choice that makes him free, Leave him in tragic loneliness to choose, With all in life to win or all to lose.

  Edwin Markham

  Loneliness, Winning, Men

  5 Copy quote

• One cannot balance tragedy in the scales Unless one weighs it with the tragic heart.

  Stephen Vincent Benet

  Heart, Balance, Tragedy

  1928 'John Brown's Body'.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source