Tragic Quotes - Page 23

We have no adequate conception of the perfection of the ancient tragic dance. The pleasure which the greeks received from it had for its basis difference; & the more unfit the vehicle, the more lively was the curiosity & intense the delights at seeing the difficulty overcome.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Dance, Differences, Dancing

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2015). “The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetry, Plays, Literary Essays, Lectures, Autobiography and Letters (Classic Illustrated Edition): The Entire Opus of the English poet, literary critic and philosopher, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel, Lyrical Ballads, Conversation Poems and Biographia Literaria”, p.2701, e-artnow

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There's nothing tragic about being fifty. Not unless you're trying to be twenty-five.

William Holden

Trying, Twenties, Fifty

"Fictional character: Joe Gillis". "Sunset Boulevard", www.imdb.com. 1950.

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Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy - common clay, if you like - eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others - the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes

Jean Anouilh

Lying, Hero, Race

Jean Anouilh (1951). “Legend of lovers”

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(Farm workers) are involved in the planting and the cultivation and the harvesting of the greatest abundance of food known in this society. They bring in so much food to feed you and me and the whole country and enough food to export to other places. The ironic thing and the tragic thing is that after they make this tremendous contribution, they don't have any money or any food left for themselves.

Cesar Chavez

Country, Ironic, Abundance

"The Words of César Chávez".

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He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:
This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid.
Till in the end he could not change the tragic habits
This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.

Robert Graves

Philosophy, Drawing, Rabbits

Robert Graves, Lucia Graves (1995). “Complete short stories”, Carcanet Press Ltd.

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Most people go on living their everyday life: half-frightened, half indifferent, they behold the ghostly tragic-comedy that is being performed on the international stage before the eyes and ears of the world.

Albert Einstein

Eye, People, Everyday

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The thing I try to get across to the writers - and I do a lot of writing, too - is that when I do stand-up, nothing I talk about is funny. Everything is really sad and tragic and then I make it funny.

Chris Rock

Fun, Writing, Trying

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Though it is true we are the highest and smartest animals, ospreys have eyes we have calculated to be sixty times more powerful and sophisticated than our own and that blindness, often caused by microscopic parasites that are themselves miracles of ingenuity, is one of the oldest and most tragic disorders known to man. And why award the superior eye (or in the case of cat or bat, also the ear) to the inferior species.

Christopher Hitchens

Powerful, Cat, Eye

Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Long Live Hitch: Three Classic Books in One Volume”, p.84, Atlantic Books Ltd

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As many know, and especially those who may have young sons or daughters at colleges or universities, the last thing you want to hear is a call that perhaps one of your children was injured or, even worse, lost their life in a tragic fire at a dorm or campus housing.

Vito Fossella

Daughter, Mother, Children

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Small businesses have made the call that to stay alive, health care isn't something they can provide. I think it's a tragic calculation.

Peter Lee

Thinking, Alive, Care

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One of the pitfalls about writing about illness is that it is very easy to imagine people with cancer as either these wise-beyond-their-years creatures or these sad-eyed tragic people. And the truth is, people living with cancer are very much like people who are not living with cancer. They're every bit as funny and complex and diverse as anyone else.

John Green

Wise, Cancer, Writing

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He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

Edith Wharton

Loneliness, Winter, Profound

Ethan Frome preface (1911)

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Congratulations," he said, his voice dry. "You finally managed to find a woman as tragically noble as yourself. I didn't think one existed." "I'm not tragic." Kaldar held up his hand. "Spare me. Some children are born wearing a silk shirt; you were born wrapped in melancholy. When they slapped you to make you cry, you just sighed heavily and a single tear rolled from your eye." He dragged his finger from the corner of his left eye to his cheek. " Your first words were probably 'woe is me.'" "My first words were 'Kaldar, shut up!' because you talked too much. Still do.

Ilona Andrews

Children, Congratulations, Eye

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Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.

George Eliot

Heart, Sadness, Ties

George Eliot (1859). “Adam Bede”, p.34, London

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The world really changed after 9/11, not just in the tragic way, but in every way. So it took me a couple of years to even understand how my art form I could process any of this. When the world changed, eliciting laughter with subjects that were funny to me before 9/11 just didnt seem good enough.

Albert Brooks

Art, Laughter, Couple

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I love Downton Abbey. It's just great. My mother giving birth to me was just like Lady Sybil giving birth, except that there wasn't such a tragic ending.

Jack Whitehall

Mother, Giving, Birth

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I think above all else [The Social Network] is a love story. And something of a tragic one, I suppose.

Andrew Garfield

Thinking, Stories, Love Story

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Ric Flair, you can tell all these people that I'm full of it for calling myself the Legend Killer? Well, I think you're full of it for coming out here every Monday and telling the whole world that Triple H is the best wrestler in the world today. I know it's not true, I'm pretty sure all these people know it's not true and Ric Flair, I know that deep down inside your heart, you know it's not true either which is why it's so tragic to see what you've become. This generation is gonna remember Ric Flair for kissing Triple H's ass!

Randy Orton

Monday, Heart, Kissing

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As a rule people don't think other people on drugs are funny. They think they are tragic. They have a point, but I still had the funny.

Natasha Lyonne

Thinking, People, Drug

"Spoonful of Sugar : Natasha Lyonne's Sweet Comeback" by Shira Levine, Heeb Magazine, January 20, 2009.

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She liked things that had been written by people who had lived short, ugly, and tragic lives. Or, who at least, were English.

Joe Hill

People, Ugly, Written

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When you start trying to figure out what you're the best at, that's when you become delusional because you start to believe that. [you're the best] I'd rather continue to ride that mule than to ride the cocky horse. You see people spin out of control like that all the time. Those are the most tragic stories – the most gifted people who start to believe that it's really ALL THEM. It's not all you. It can't be all you. Just like you need air to fly a kite. It's not the KITE – it's the AIR.

Pharrell Williams

Horse, Believe, Cocky

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I believe Andy was meant to die because he was too good I'm almost happy it ended the way it did because I've learned so many lessons from him. It would have been tragic if we got into fights and then divorced [If he had lived], I would be a fat housewife with three kids in Sands Point, Long Island.

Rachel Uchitel

Believe, Kids, Fighting

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...so much attention is paid to the aggressive sins, such as violence and cruelty, and greed with all their tragic effects, that too little attention is paid to the passive sins, such as apathy and laziness, which in the long run can have a more devastating and destructive effect upon society than the others.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Running, Long, Greed

Eleanor Roosevelt (1960). “You Learn by Living”, p.153, Westminster John Knox Press

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My God", he whispered. What have I done to her? He thought, humbled. The spell was broken, but it wasn't sealed, and her soul was bare to him, the scars of her tragic past and her triumphs over pain and her aching need to find her place. He just wanted to hold her to him and tell her it would be okay, that she had survived and was beautiful.

Kim Harrison

Beautiful, Pain, Past

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It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course—for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.

Carl Jung

Distance, Men, Tragedy

Carl Gustav Jung (1959). “pt. 1. The archetypes and the collective unconscious”

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