Famous Quotes & Sayings

Paulo Coelho

However good we are, however correctly we seek to lead our lives, tragedies do occur. We can blame others, look for justification, imagine how our lives would have been different without them. But none of that matters: they have happened, and that is that. From this point on, it is necessary that we review our own lives, overcome fear, and begin the process of reconstruction.

Quentin Crisp

Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.

Pico Iyer

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Thomas Sowell

Few of the great tragedies of history were created by the village idiot, and many by the village genius.

Saul Alinsky

Human beings do not like to look squarely into the face of tragedy. Gloom is unpopular.

Robin Roberts

The tragedy is not so much the experience that you're having. The tragedy is that we don't take the time to understand the meaning and purpose behind what we're going through.

Robin Morgan

every actor knows that tragedy, being linear and inevitable, is taxing - but comedy, which depends on the element of surprise, is the hardest act of all.

Thomas Harris

The tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.

Thomas Kyd

Then haste we down to meet thy friends and foes; To place thy friends in ease, the rest in woes. For here though death doth end their misery, I'll there begin their endless tragedy.

Jeanette Winterson

Stories end in reverie, tragedy, or forgiveness.

Jeff Bridges

I love John Irving's stuff. It's that marriage of comedy and tragedy. It's really terrific.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

There has never been an American tragedy. There have only been great failures.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself died with it! Away, away with you, puny, stunted imitators! Away with you to Hades, and eat your fill of the old masters' crumbs!

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Henry Miller

That we cannot rise equal to situations when we are in them — that is the tragedy of life.

Helen Keller

I have found out that though the ways in which I can make myself useful are few, yet the work open to me is endless.

George Eliot

What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?

Jean Anouilh

Tragedy is clean, it is restful, it is flawless.

Jean Anouilh

Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it.

Myles Munroe

One of the greatest tragedies in life is to watch potential die untapped.

Mike Birbiglia

Comedy is tragedy plus time, but the time is different for everybody.

Nathan Fillion

There's comedy even in tragedy. There's comedy in life. And in 'Castle', we go for that comedy.

Julian Barnes

Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.

Irvin D. Yalom

If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.

I. F. Stone

History is a tragedy, not a morality tale.

J. K. Rowling

I'm not a billionaire, what a tragedy.

Milan Kundera

...she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.

Joni Mitchell

I don't understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions?

James Thurber

Writers of comedy have outlook, whereas writers of tragedy have, according to them, insight.

Emile M. Cioran

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?

Ellen Glasgow

The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.

Emily Dickinson

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

Ellen Page

There's obviously a lot of tragedy in comedy; I really enjoy the paradox of what a really good comedy is.