The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
The great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
When people divorce, it’s always such a tragedy. At the same time, if people stay together it can be even worse.
Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.
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.
Following the Second World War, we are a country of one ethnicity. After the moving of the borders, after the tragedy of the Holocaust and the murder of Polish Jews, we don’t have large minority groups.
In times of tragedy, we put our differences aside and work towards a common goal – a spirit of unity that we should strive to embody each and every day in addressing our challenges, both large and small.
Why do we wait for tragedy to strike to tell someone how special they are, or how special they were?
The greatest tragedy for any human being is going through their entire lives believing the only perspective that matters is their own.
Benghazi was a tragedy. Libya is a tragedy.
I wanted to write a book about two women falling in love that wasn’t hinged on tragedy or that involved some horrible identity-based misfortune. I wanted to write a pretty standard romantic comedy where nobody dies, nobody gets hurt, nobody gets sick.
Normally street children are shown in terms of the tragedy of their lives – which is true – but there’s also another dimension: their wisdom, dignity and enormous capacity for survival.
Laurence Olivier said in an interview once that when he plays a tragedy he always aims for the funny parts, and the other way around. Because in a comedy you look for what’s serious. I think that’s true. Sometimes things are really funny if you’re absolutely earnest. If you’re really serious, it’s hilarious.
I don’t think I’m morbid by nature. Serious writers have always written about serious subjects. Lighthearted material doesn’t appeal to me, and I don’t read it. I think I’m a realist, with a realistic sensibility of history and the tragedy of history.
I mean, whose songs don’t focus on tragedy and loss?
I don’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican or a conservative, the election of Trump is a national tragedy for multiple reasons. It will go down as one of the worst tragedies in American history. But he’s not a dictator. This happened because we either allowed it or voted for it.
At Juve you were first or you were nothing. If we went out of the Champions League it was a tragedy. I saw team-mates who did not eat for a week.
I feel like there should be a statute of limitations on scoring political points on the tragedy that was Hurricane Katrina.
The tragedy of September 11th was so sudden, so enormous, and so horrendous, both in terms of lives lost and global consequences, that this country and the world went into immediate and prolonged shock.
There’s not an athlete in the world who doesn’t deal with the same issues you and I have: frustrations with our family, dealing with tragedy or loss, or happiness and a child’s birth.
My parents were not musical, and they were not effervescent people; everything was very quiet. The music that I played was loud; it used to drive them up the wall. My father died, and that was a tragedy for everybody, but suddenly I didn’t have anybody to stop me from doing what I wanted to do.
It is not an exaggeration to say that under Obama, the naturalization process – becoming a citizen – no longer requires becoming an American. The real tragedy and the real crime of the Obama plan for accelerated naturalization of millions flows from the redefinition of citizenship as a triumph of multiculturalism.
I want to show people you can overcome a tragedy.
The constituents of tragedy may be universally acknowledged, easily invoked and deeply felt, but the elements of comedy are, I think, more widely variable from person to person.
The tragedy is not that love doesn’t last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.
There’s always a sense of tragedy with icons. It happened to both the Princess of Wales and Diana Dors. A lot of people had grown up with them, and everybody loved them. Then, when they had at last found happiness, they were taken in the most dreadful way.
No nation helps more people around the globe. Our deep generosity is given so freely that it is simply expected, by others and by ourselves. From Ethiopia to Haiti to Japan where there is tragedy, famine or disaster, we lead the way with private and public help.
When you’re playing King Lear, you have to have a little humour, or you will have no tragedy when the king dies.
The tragedy of war is that it uses man’s best to do man’s worst.
We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
The best way to prepare for a night out with a Shakespearean tragedy is to do a bit of reading up in the afternoon, eat a light supper – perhaps Welsh rarebit – and then arrive early to do some stretching exercises in the foyer before curtain-up.
The tragedy of life is not that man loses but that he almost wins.
It’s rare in Hollywood to get the chance to work on something that you actually care about. The tragedy of the place is all these talented people trying to get excited about stuff they themselves would only view at gunpoint.
None of us are exempt from tragedy.
Being depressed is not a beautiful tragedy – it’s hell and it’s agony. Posting photos of someone that you don’t have the consent for is illegal, and that’s a huge, huge issue. We need to be teaching consent, and that’s not just for photos.
There is something irresistibly funny about a funeral. More basically, I think the point is that beyond the deepest tragedy, there is laughter. Even in the midst of tragedy, there is always the possibility for it.
The United States is the ultimate land of optimistic promise, but it also gave birth to quintessentially pessimistic tragedy: ‘Moby-Dick.’
It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.
At the root of everything I write is tragedy.
I am not a big fan of politicians turning tragedy into opportunity, but I believe that which politician a victim’s family wants to meet is entirely their decision.
Samurai films, like westerns, need not be familiar genre stories. They can expand to contain stories of ethical challenges and human tragedy.
Downloading and Web 2.0 have famously led to new ways of accessing culture. But these have tended to be parasitic on old media. The law of Web 2.0 is that everything comes back, whether it be adverts, public information films or long-forgotten TV serials: history happens first as tragedy, then as YouTube.
I love John Irving’s stuff. It’s that marriage of comedy and tragedy. It’s really terrific.
I’m sure that in the future, every part of the world will recognize that Holodomor is a huge tragedy for Ukraine, and was actually the destruction of Ukrainian people.
The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.
Humor is merely tragedy standing on its head with its pants torn.
War is a tragedy. It’s not pretty, and in my opinion, there are no winners. Everybody’s a victim, from the one who’s suffering pain to the person inflicting it.
In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.
The worst tragedy that could have befallen me was my success. I knew right away that I was through – cast out.
And I have lived since – as you have – in a period of cold war, during which we have ensured by our achievements in the science and technology of destruction that a third act in this tragedy of war will result in the peace of extinction.
The closer we come to the Greek tragedy that is Brexit, the more horrifying it is to behold.
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.
Here is the tragedy: when you are the victim of depression, not only do you feel utterly helpless and abandoned by the world, you also know that very few people can understand, or even begin to believe, that life can be this painful. There is nothing I can think of that is quite as isolating as this.
I always thought the point of life was something richer than that. Something full of great tragedy or comedy, reversal of fortune, ecstasy, that kind of thing. But no, contemporary urban theorists seem satisfied with the merely livable, which always sounds to me like the merely survivable, the not so bad.
As the web becomes more and more of a part of our every day lives, it would be a horrible tragedy if it was locked up inside of companies and proprietary software.
My natural state is to be happy. I’m naturally buoyant. I wake up feeling, ‘What a great morning!’ I’ve had some tragedy in my life, absolutely, but I don’t know one human being who hasn’t. You either learn from it and become empowered by it, or you become a victim to it. It’s life, after all.
