The most fundamental law of tragedy is that the moments of greatest happiness are the hardest to attain.
It is profoundly tragic that I am a slave, but it is profoundly joyous that I am God's slave, not that of a devil.
The most fundamental tragedy of my life is that the ones who I see do not exist and the one who exists I do not see.
Suffering is in the grand scheme of things. It is meant to teach a lesson. Sometimes it takes a lot of repeating until the lesson is learned. Both good and bad people reap the benefits of the sunshine. Both good and bad people receive rain for their crops. Chaos and disaster befalls both the good and the bad. The difference in the aftermath of tragedy is the lesson learned or not learned.
“I think,” the Father General said, “that I could be of more help to you if I knew whether you see all this as comedy or tragedy.”
Emilio did not answer right away. So much, he was thinking, for keeping silent about what can’t be changed. So much for Latino pride. He felt sometimes like the seedhead of a dandelion, flying apart, blown to pieces in a puff of air. The humiliation was almost beyond bearing. He thought, and hoped sometimes, that it would kill him, that his heart would actually stop. Maybe this is part of the joke, he thought bleakly. He turned away from the windows to gaze across the room at the elderly man watching him quietly from the far end of the beautiful old table.
“If I knew that,” Emilio Sandoz said, coming as close as he could to the center of his soul and to the admission that shamed him, “I don’t suppose I’d need the help.”
Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it.
The death of one is a tragedy. The death of millions is just a statistic.
Misfortune occurs or can occur to anyone, of any sort of character. The eudaimonic has more resources to avoid it (being in autonomous control of his appetites and assumptions) and more resources to deal with it if it occurs (being better able to put it in perspective and maintain his own evenness of self-mastery). Tragedy as a dramatic form is meant to foster the ethos of sophrosyne or moderation, "nothing to excess"; it nurtures a sense of distance from the dominant illusions and delusions that may infect even aristoi.
Eudaimonia is natural fatalism, the self-destiny of character--daimones being traditionally the lowest-order divinities, steering us to our unknown ends. Sometimes disaster befalls us because we veer from our own intrinsic good sense; sometimes it occurs because we have followed our own intrinsic good sense but this is rooted in an ultimately or obscurely dysdaimonic character. Tragedy is not always the result of a "mistake"; or sometimes the mistake lies in what we are, not what we do. Unlike mere misfortune or chance, tragedy is rooted in primal actions and preconceptions of our character. Petty-souled individuals (micropsychia) are unlikely to bring tragedy on themselves; in a way, they already are tragic beings normally and all of the time. Only ambitious and self-driving individuals of great soul (megalopsychia) bring on themselves the risk of tragedy in its truest form, a radical overstepping of bounds.
Character is characters; our nature is a plural complexity, a multiphasic polysemous weave, a bundle, a tangle, a sleeve. […]
I like to imagine a person’s psyche to be like a boardinghouse full of characters. The ones who show up regularly and who habitually follow the house rules may not have met other long-term residents who stay behind closed doors, or who only appear at night. An adequate theory of character must make room for character actors, for the stuntmen and animal handlers, for all the figures who play bit parts and produce unexpected acts. They often make the show fateful, or tragic, or farcically absurd.
It helps to regard soul as an active intelligence, forming and plotting each person’s fate. Translators use “plot” to render the ancient Greek word mythos in English. The plots that entangle our souls and draw forth our characters are the great myths. That is why we need a sense of myth and knowledge of different myths to gain insight into our epic struggles, our misalliances, and our tragedies. Myths show the imaginative structures inside our messes, and our human characters can locate themselves against the background of the characters of myth.
Tragedy blows through your life like a tornado, uprooting everything, creating chaos. You wait for the dust to settle, and then you choose. You can live in the wreckage and pretend it's still the mansion you remember. Or you can crawl from the rubble and slowly rebuild. Because after disaster strikes, the important thing is that you move on. But if you're like me, you just keep chasing the storm.
The balance is felt in the crying laughter of knowing and experiencing the comedy of the tragedy. To express its wholeness one must recieve what you give....
Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.
The tragedy of life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach.
Getting used to our blessings is one of the most important nonevil generators of human evil, tragedy and suffering.
The tragedy of love is indifference.
All perform their tragic play, There struts Hamlet, there is Lear.
Heaven blazing into the head: Tragedy wrought to its uttermost. Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages And all the drop-scenes drop at once Upon a hundred thousand stages It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.
Our government has become too responsive to trivial or ephemeral concerns, often at the expense of more important concerns or an erosion of our liberty, and it has made policy priorities more dependent on where TV journalists happen to point their cameras. . . . As a nation we have lost our sense of tragedy, a recognition that bad things happen to good people. A nation that expects the government to prevent churches from burning, to control the price of bread or gasoline, to secure every job, and to find some villain for every dramatic accident, risks an even larger loss of life and liberty.
Without order or authority in the spirit of man the free way of life leads through weakness, disorganization, self-indulgence, and moral indifference to the destruction of freedom itself. The tragic ordeal through which the Western world is passing was prepared in the long period of easy liberty, during which men . . . forgot that their freedom was achieved by heroic sacrifice. . . . They forgot that their rights were founded on their duties. . . . They thought it clever to be cynical, enlightened to be unbelieving, and sensible to be soft.
Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor - all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked - who is good? Not that men are ignorant - what is truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.
A rose only becomes beautiful and blesses others when it opens up and blooms. Its greatest tragedy is to stay in a tight-closed bud, never fulfilling its potential.
Love can cure heartbreaks, misfortune, or tragedy. It is the eternal companion.
It is sad indeed to die in your spirit while you live in your body. It is equally tragic to be asleep in life when you should be wide awake to this great world.
The greatest tragedy of life is that, having paid that awful price of suffering "according to the flesh that his bowels might be filled with compassion," and being now prepared to reach down and help us, he is forbidden because we won't let him. We look down instead of up.
Between "just desserts" and "tragic irony" we are given quite a lot of scope for our particular talent. Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have got about as bad as they reasonably get.
No man made great by death offers more hope to lowly pride than does Abraham Lincoln; for while living he was himself so simple as often to be dubbed a fool. Foolish he was, they said, in losing his youthful heart to a grave and living his life on married patience; foolish in pitting his homely ignorance against Douglas, brilliant, courtly, and urbane; foolish in setting himself to do the right in a world where the day goes mostly to the strong; foolish in dreaming of freedom for a long-suffering folk whom the North is as anxious to keep out as the South was to keep down; foolish in choosing the silent Grant to lead to victory the hesitant armies of the North; foolish, finally, in presuming that government for the people must be government of the people and by the people. Foolish many said; foolish many, many believed. This Lincoln, whom so many living friends and foes alike deemed foolish, hid his bitterness in laughter; fed his sympathy on solitude; and met recurring disaster with whimsicality to muffle the murmur of a bleeding heart. Out of the tragic sense of life he pitied where others blamed; bowed his own shoulders with the woes of the weak; endured humanely his little day of chance power; and won through death what life disdains to bestow upon such simple souls - lasting peace and everlasting glory.
The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.
