1,113 Quotes About Tragedy

The heart of tragedy does not lie in stealing or taking away. Any featherpated girl can steal a heart. It lies in giving, in putting on, in adding, in smothering without the pillows.

If you pursue this road that you've embarked upon, you will eventually come to moral decisions that will take you completely by surprise

I do not believe that true optimism can come about except through tragedy.

Humor is a way of holding off how awful life can be, to protect yourself. Finally, you get just too tired, and the news is too awful, and humor doesn’t work anymore. Somebody like Mark Twain thought life was quite awful but held the awfulness at bay with jokes and so forth, but finally he couldn’t do it anymore. His wife, his best friend, and two of his daughters had died. If you live long enough, a lot of people close to you are going to die.

There are no tragedies in life, only violent coup d’etats on the state of irrational optimism

Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil. . . Hysterical optimism as a sin against knowledge.

Something has gotten into me; something I didn’t want. The moment my skin touched hers, it overwhelmed me with desires of the deepest kind. It’s crawled beneath my flesh, and my every pore is infected by her. An addiction that is as frustrating as this illness.

In myth, even the greatest heroes must meet their tragic end, although, unlike the rest of us, they have at least lived.

As one who appreciated the tragic side of eating, it seemed to him that anything other than fruit for dessert implied a reprehensible frivolity, and cakes in particular ended up annihilating the flavour of quiet sadness that must be allowed to linger at the end of a great culinary performance.