Tragedy Quotes

“Comedy is tragedy plus time.”

“The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”

“tragedy”

“Wikipedia: Tragedy”

“The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel.”

“Comedy is in act superior to tragedy and humourous reasoning superior to grandiloquent reasoning.”

“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

“Wikicommons: Tragedies”

“A tragedy can never suffer by delay: a comedy may, because the allusions or the manners represented in it maybe temporary.”

“These struggles have got to result in happy endings for all, and the readers must learn not to worship tragedy as the highest art any more.”

“Aristotle Poetics, (online ed.) publisher: Tufts.”

“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.”

“I have changed my definition of tragedy. I now think tragedy is not foul deeds done to a person (usually noble in some manner) but rather that tragedy is irresolvable conflict. Both sides/ideas are right.”

“Taplin, Oliver; Billings, Joshua What is Tragedy?, place: UK, publisher: Oxford University.”

“Gorgias called tragedy a deception wherein he who deceives is more honest than he who does not deceive, and he who is deceived is wiser than he who is not deceived.”

“A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language ... not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.”

“I had not been long back from Hiroshima when I heard someone say, in Szilárd's presence; that it was the tragedy of scientists that their discoveries were used for destruction. Szilárd replied, as he more than anyone else had the right to reply; that it was not the tragedy of scientists, it is the tragedy of mankind.”

“The legacy of modernity is a legacy of fratricidal wars, devastating "development," cruel "civilization," and previously unimagined violence. Erich Auerbach once wrote that tragedy is the only genre that can properly claim realism in Western literature, and perhaps this is true precisely because of the tragedy Western modernity has imposed on the world.”

“In this age few tragedies are written. It has often been held that the lack is due to a paucity of heroes among us, or else that modern man has had the blood drawn out of his organs of belief by the skepticism of science, and the heroic attack on life cannot feed on an attitude of reserve and circumspection. For one reason or another, we are often held to be below tragedy — or tragedy above us.”

“Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of cause and effect.
No tragedy can therefore come about when its author fears to question absolutely everything, when he regards any institution, habit or custom as being either everlasting, immutable or inevitable. In the tragic view the need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star, and whatever it is that hedges his nature and lowers it is ripe for attack and examination.”