Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.
Robert Francis Kennedy
The tragedy is that so many have ambition and so few have ability.
William Feather
Our tragedy is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it... the basest of all things is to be afraid.
William Faulkner
Tragedy is an imitation of a whole and complete action of some amplitude. . . . Now a whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Aristotle
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.
Arthur Miller
Laughter is ever young, whereas tragedy, except the very highest of all, quickly becomes haggard.
Margaret Sackville
The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
Tom Stoppard
The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a butterfly.
Richard David Bach
The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations.
Adam Smith
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
The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
Jean Maurice Eugne Clment Cocteau
The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy