Tragic Quotes - Page 22

• Criticism, analysis, and insults are tragic expressions of unmet needs.

  Marshall B. Rosenberg

  Communication, Expression, Criticism

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• The sad end he met in Afghanistan was more accurately a function of his stubborn idealism - his insistence on trying to do the right thing. In which case it wasn't a tragic flaw that brought Tillman down, but a tragic virtue.

  Jon Krakauer

  Trying, Stubborn, Flaws

  "Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman". Book by Jon Krakauer, 2009.

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• All moralistic judgments, whether positive or negative, are tragic expressions of unmet needs.

  Marshall B. Rosenberg

  Communication, Expression, Negative

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• Without beauty a girl is unhappy because she has missed her chance to be loved. People do not jeer at her, they are not cruel to her, but it is as if she were invisible, no eyes follow her as she walks. People feel uncomfortable when they are with her. They find it easier to ignore her. A girl who is exceptionally beautiful, on the other hand, who has something which too far surpasses the customary seductive freshness of adolescence, appears somehow unreal. Great beauty seems invariably to portend some tragic fate.

  Michel Houellebecq

  Beautiful, Girl, Eye

  Michel Houellebecq (2001). “The Elementary Particles”, p.61, Vintage

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• I can think of no better way of redeeming this tragic world today than love and laughter. Too many of the young have forgotten how to laugh, and too many of the elders have forgotten how to love. Would not our lives be lightened if only we could all learn to laugh more easily at ourselves and to love one another?

  Theodore Hesburgh

  Love, Funny, Happiness

  Theodore Martin Hesburgh (1979). “The Hesburgh Papers: Higher Values in Higher Education”

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• Imagine a room awash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has nine thousand matches. The other has seven thousand matches. Each of them is concerned about who's ahead, who's stronger. Well that's the kind of situation we are actually in. The amount of weapons that are available to the United States and the Soviet Union are so bloated, so grossly in excess of what's needed to dissuade the other, that if it weren't so tragic, it would be laughable. What is necessary is to reduce the matches and to clean up the gasoline.

  Carl Sagan

  Science, Two, Enemy

  During a panel discussion in ABC News Viewpoint following the TV movie "The Day After", November 20, 1983.

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• Science is rooted in the will to truth. With the will to truth it stands or falls. Lower the standard even slightly and science becomes diseased at the core. Not only science, but man. The will to truth, pure and unadulterated, is among the essential conditions of his existence; if the standard is compromised he easily becomes a kind of tragic caricature of himself.

  Max Wertheimer

  Fall, Science, Men

  Max Wertheimer, Lothar Spillmann (2012). “On Perceived Motion and Figural Organization”, p.262, MIT Press

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• It's tragic when people think feminism is a dirty word.

  Siobhan Fahey

  Dirty, Naughty, Thinking

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• Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized upon by a madness which forced them to commit the very acts which make it certain that what they dread will happen.

  Rebecca West

  Future, Madness, Certain

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• And this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Life, Loneliness, Simple

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• One tragic example of the loss of forests and then water is found in Ethiopia. The amount of its forested land has decreased from 40 to 1 percent in the last four decades. Concurrently, the amount of rainfall has declined to the point where the country is rapidly becoming a wasteland.

  Al Gore

  Country, Loss, Science

  Al Gore (2013). “Earth in the Balance: Forging a New Common Purpose”, p.107, Routledge

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• Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding.

  Thomas Merton

  Heart, Meditation, Doubt

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.12, New Directions Publishing

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• We live in an era where masses of people come and go across a hostile planet, desolate and violent. Refugees, emigrants, exiles, deportees. We are a tragic contingent.

  Isabel Allende

  Peace, People, Eras

  Isabel Allende, John Rodden (2004). “Conversations with Isabel Allende: Revised Edition”, p.58, University of Texas Press

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• Samoa culture demonstrates how much the tragic or the easy solution of the Oedipus situation depends upon the inter-relationship between parents and children, and is not created out of whole cloth by the young child's biological impulses.

  Margaret Mead

  Children, Science, Oedipus

  Margaret Mead (1975). “Male and female: a study of the sexes in a changing world”, William Morrow & Co

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• The news of life is carried via telephone. A baby's birth, a couple engaged, a tragic car accident on a late night highway - most milestones of the human journey, good or bad, are foreshadowed by the sound of a ringing.

  Mitch Albom

  Baby, Couple, Night

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• The death of my daughter is a subject I talk about briefly because there is nothing more tragic.

  Ben Vereen

  Daughter, Mother, Subjects

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• Akri won't let me eat any of them nasty gods. What's the world coming to when a demon gots to beg for tidbits...not eve a finger sandwich or a single knuckle. Tragic. Terribly tragic.

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Sandwiches, World, Knuckles

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• The life of a wild animal always has a tragic end.

  Ernest Thompson Seton

  Life, Science, Animal

  Ernest Thompson Seton (2007). “Wild Animals I Have Known”, p.14, Yesterday's Classics

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• Voting against the resolution authorizing the use of military force in Iraq was one of my proudest moments as a senator. It is long past time to close this tragic chapter in American history.

  Barbara Boxer

  Military, Past, Iraq

  FaceBook post by Senator Barbara Boxer from May 22, 2014

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• On the unofficial level it was a glorious moment in our national life because young people decided that this had to stop, that they could no longer stand the shedding of blood in this tragic adventure in Southeast Asia.

  William Kunstler

  Travel, Adventure, Blood

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• If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Technology, Fiction

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.169, Grove Press

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• The only equivalent plunge from genius I could think of was Ernest Hemmingway's tragic loss of ability to write. Hemmingway got up one morning and shot himself. Nicklaus got up the next morning and shot 66.

  Ian Wooldridge

  Morning, Writing, Loss

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• Greek myths are heroic, noble and tragic; but the American Dream is heroic, comical, and uplifting. Americans are a people in whom overweening ambition is rewarded, not punished. The Wright Brothers did not have their wings melt when they flew too high. Perhaps their wings were more soundly built than those of Icarus.

  John C. Wright

  Uplifting, Dream, Brother

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• Depression, when it's clinical, is not a metaphor. It runs in families, and it's known to respond to medication and to counseling. However truly you believe there's a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you're depressed you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don't want to feel bad anymore. The shift from depressive realism to tragic realism, from being immobilized by darkness to being sustained by it, thus strangely seems to require believing in the possibility of a cure.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Running, Depressing, Believe

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• The death of one man is tragic, but the death of thousands is statistic.

  Joseph Stalin

  Army, Men, One Man

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