Tragic Quotes - Page 25

• We are all smiling in the picture, three brothers having a grand old time just playing around in the living room, no agendas, no buried resentments or permanent scars. Even under the best of circumstances, there's just something so damn tragic about growing up.

  Jonathan Tropper

  Brother, Growing Up, Rooms

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• The truth is, our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of loving charity and fearful clutching of possessions.

  Alan Paton

  Christian, Country, Practice

  Alan Paton (2003). “Cry, the Beloved Country”, p.141, Simon and Schuster

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• Our sense of the tragic waxes and wanes with our sensuality.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Tragedy, Sensuality

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• California is a tragic country - like Palestine, like every Promised Land.

  Christopher Isherwood

  Country, Land, California

  Christopher Isherwood, James J. Berg, Chris Freeman (2001). “Conversations with Christopher Isherwood”, p.91, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• The product of the artist has become less important than the fact of the artist. We wish to absorb this person. We wish to devour someone who has experienced the tragic. In our society this person is much more important than anything he might create.

  David Mamet

  Artist, Wish, Important

  David Mamet (1986). “Writing in restaurants”, Viking Adult

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• There is a god. Nothing as tragic and ridiculous as this world could have happened by random chance.

  Lynn Viehl

  World, Random Chance, Ridiculous

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• Only after a while did it occur to me (in spite of the chilly silence which surrounded me) that my story was not of the tragic sort, but rather of the comic variety. At any rate that afforded me some comfort.

  Milan Kundera

  Silence, Comfort, Stories

  Milan Kundera (1974). “Laughable Loves”

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• There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind. It may be helpful or harmful, it is just a part of the will to survive—yet, also, it has made it possible for us to engage in one weakening war after another. But it is a necessary part of our mechanism that we should be able to cry only for a time over even an ocean of spilt milk—the spectacular must soon become the commonplace if life is to be supportable.

  John Wyndham

  War, Ocean, Will To Survive

  John Wyndham (1951). “The Day of the Triffids”, Fawcett

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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.

  Carl Jung

  Life, Men, Tragedy

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

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• The Church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshiping men. This she has not done deliberately, but little by little and without her knowledge; and her very unawareness only makes her situation all the more tragic.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Men, Thinking, Church

  Aiden Wilson Tozer (1975). “The Knowledge of the Holy: The Attributes of God: Their Meaning in the Christian Life”

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• Most of the scientists I have known well have felt - just as deeply as the non-scientists I have known well - that the individual condition of each is tragic. Each of us is alone: sometimes we escape from solitariness, through love or affection or perhaps creative moments, but those triumphs of life are pools of light we make for ourselves while the edge of the road is black: each of us dies alone.

  C.P. Snow

  Light, Creative, Black

  "The Two Cultures".

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• I don't react to a tragic happening any more. I took so many bad things as a kid and some people think I don't care about anything. It's just too hard for me to get emotional. I can't cry no more.

  Mike Tyson

  Kids, Emotional, Thinking

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• To be homeward bound, no matter what tragic memories you have harbored, is unlike any voyage a man can ever make.

  Leon Uris

  Memories, Men, Matter

  Leon Uris (1995). “Redemption”, G K Hall & Company

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• I am always a beginner. I only try to include different parts of life; the pastoral, the tragic, et cetera.

  Ian Hamilton Finlay

  Past, Trying, Different

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• Last, but not least -- in fact, this is most important -- you need a happy ending. However, if you can create tragic situations and jerk a few tears before the happy ending, it will work much better.

  Satyajit Ray

  Important, Tears, Facts

  Satyajit Ray (2004). “Complete Adventures of Feluda”, p.575, Penguin Books India

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• The unicorn was white, with hoofs of silver and graceful horn of pearl... The glorious thing about him was his eye. There was a faint bluish furrow down each side of his nose, and this led to the eye sockets, and surrounded them in a pensive shade. The eyes, circled by this sad and beautiful darkness, were so sorrowful, lonely, gentle and nobly tragic, that they killed all other emotions except love.

  T. H. White

  Beautiful, Lonely, Eye

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• The most tragic moment of my life was the first show I ever designed for. I had been asked to make shoes for Ossie Clark's show in the early '70s. I was so inexperienced that I didn't put the steel in the heels of the shoes, which is required to support the shoe and the wearer. So the girls came out walking very strangely in these rubber, bendy high-heeled shoes I had made. I thought 'Oh dear god! This is the end of me.' But after the show, even David Hockney and Cecil Beaton said to me 'It was so interesting that the girls were moving in such a different way.'

  Manolo Blahnik

  Girl, Moving, Shoes

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• The tragic reality of today is reflected in the true plight of our spiritual existence. We are spineless and cannot stand straight.

  Ai Weiwei

  Spiritual, Reality, Plight

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• It is tragic for our God, Who gave us His Son to die on the cross, to beg us to love Him.

  Jack Hyles

  Son, Crosses, Dies

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• He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.

  Don DeLillo

  Pain, Self, World

  Don DeLillo (2011). “White Noise”, p.24, Pan Macmillan

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• For a while he'd tried molding himself into the tragic Romantic hero, brooding and staring clench-jawed off into space as he composed dark verse in his head. But it turned out that trying to appear tragic in Incontinence, Indiana, was redundant, and his mother kept shouting at him and making him forget his rhymes. "Tommy, if you keep grinding your teeth like that, they'll wear away and you'll have to have dentures like Aunt Ester." Tommy only wished his beard was as heavy as Aunt Ester's---then he could stare out over the moors while he stroked it pensively.

  Christopher Moore

  Mother, Hero, Dark

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• Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Change, Night, Light

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• Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension; when he does not torment himself with childish guilt feelings, but avoids tragic adult sins; when he postpones immediate pleasures for the sake of long-term values.... Our generation must be inspired to search for that maturity which will manifest itself in the qualities of tenacity, dependability, co-operativeness and the inner drive to work and sacrifice for a nobler future of mankind.

  Joshua L. Liebman

  Sacrifice, Maturity, Our Generation

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• One of the tragic consequences of divorce is that the kids are legally obligated by the courts to spend a fixed amount of time with their dads. In normal families, dads and children happily ignore each other.

  C.D. Payne

  Children, Dad, Kids

  C.D. Payne (2009). “Youth in Revolt: Now a major motion picture from Dimension Films starring Michael Cera”, p.14, Broadway Books

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• We don't live in Disneyland. We live in blood and in time, not in Fantasyland. We live in a tragic world.

  Costa-Gavras

  Time, Blood, World

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