The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
Tom Stoppard
There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.
George Bernard Shaw
Laughter is ever young, whereas tragedy, except the very highest of all, quickly becomes haggard.
Margaret Sackville
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
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
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
Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.
Hebbel
One of the tragedies of modern times is that people have come to believe that something said by someone in the past, perhaps for illustrative or provocation purposes, actually represents that person's beliefs at the time.
Idries Shah
Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.
Stephen Jay Gould
The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
Arthur C. Clarke
If the people wanted my head I would bow without demur. If I had lost the confidence or respect of the people I would not want to live. The tragedy of the drama is that the very opposite is true.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto