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The earth is mankind's ultimate haven, our blessed terra firma. When it trembles and gives way beneath our feet, it's as though one of God's checks has bounced.
-Gilbert Adair
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It is restful, tragedy, because one knows that there is no more lousy hope left. You know you're caught, caught at last like a rat with all the world on its back. And the only thing left to do is shout -- not moan, or complain, but yell out at the top of your voice whatever it was you had to say. What you've never said before. What perhaps you don't even know till now.
-Jean Anouilh
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Tragedy is a representation of action that is worthy of serious attention, complete in itself and of some magnitude - bringing about by means of pity and fear the purging of such emotions.
-Aristotle
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The true end of tragedy is to purify the passions.
-Aristotle
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Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
-Antonin Artaud
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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.
-Jacques Barzun
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I've never thought of my characters as being sad. On the contrary, they are full of life. They didn't choose tragedy. Tragedy chose them.
-Juliette Binoche
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What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
-E. M. Cioran
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The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives -- the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in yourself.
-Norman Cousins
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What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?
-George Eliot
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The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The bosses of our mass media, press, radio, film and television, succeed in their aim of taking our minds off disaster. Thus, the distraction they offer demands the antidote of maximum concentration on disaster.
-Ernst Fischer
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Man's extremity is God's opportunity.
-John Flavel
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Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.
-Edward Gibbon
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Down went the owners -- greedy men whom hope of gain allured: oh, dry the starting tear, for they were heavily insured.
-W. S. Gilbert
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Perhaps catastrophe is the natural human environment, and even though we spend a good deal of energy trying to get away from it, we are programmed for survival amid catastrophe.
-Germaine Greer
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None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
-Edith Hamilton
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A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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The greatest tragedy in America is not the destruction of our natural resources, though that tragedy is great. The truly great tragedy is the destruction of our human resources by our failure to fully utilize our abilities, which means that most men and women go to their graves with their music still in them.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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What the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending.
-William Dean Howells
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We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look.
-Aldous Huxley
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I've come to realize that life is not a musical comedy, it's a Greek tragedy.
-Billy Joel
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When any calamity has been suffered, the first thing to be remembered is how much has been escaped.
-Samuel Johnson
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There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Tragedy is like strong acid -- it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Books about Tragedy
