"There is a saying in Tibetan, 'Tragedy should be utilized as a source of strength.'

No matter what sort of difficulties, how painful experience is, if we lose our hope, that's our real disaster."
— Dalai Lama XIV

"The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think."
— Horace Walpole

"We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within."
— Stephen Jay Gould (The Mismeasure of Man)

"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."
— Joseph Stalin

"I can't go on, I'll go on."
— Samuel Beckett (I Can't Go On, I'll Go on: A Selection from Samuel Beckett's Work)

"There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt."
— Erma Bombeck

"Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . ."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windemere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest, Salome)

"A darkness different from Ember's, but just as frightening..."
— Jeanne DuPrau (The Diamond of Darkhold (The Ember Series, #4))

"All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished."
— Anaïs Nin

"The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy."
— Alan Lightman (Einstein's Dreams)

"The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it."
— W. M. Lewis

"'I know that you're selfish, selfish beyond words, and I know that you haven't the nerve of a rabbit, I know you're a liar and a humbug, I know that you're utterly contemptible. And the tragic part is'--her face was on a sudden distraught with pain--'the tragic part is that notwithstanding I love you with all my heart.'"
— W. Somerset Maugham (The Painted Veil)

"Death causes pain, life and tragedy, so do not blame yourself for his death; for it was time and fate combined."
— Me

"The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present."
— Alan Lightman (Einstein's Dreams)

"Et voilà. Maintenant le ressort est bandé. Cela n'a plus qu'à se dérouler tout seul. C'est cela qui est commode dans la tragédie. On donne le petit coup de pouce pour que cela démarre, rien, un regard pendant une seconde à une fille qui passe et lève les bras dans la rue, une envie d'honneur un beau matin, au réveil, comme de quelque chose qui se mange, une question de trop qu'on se pose un soir… C'est tout. Après, on n'a plus qu'à laisser faire. On est tranquille. Cela roule tout seul. C'est minutieux, bien huilé depuis toujours. La mort, la trahison, le désespoir sont là, tout prêts, et les éclats, et les orages, et les silences, tous les silences : le silence quand le bras du bourreau se lève à la fin, le silence au commencement quand les deux amants sont nus l'un en face de l'autre pour la première fois, sans oser bouger tout de suite, dans la chambre sombre, le silence quand les cris de la foule éclatent autour du vainqueur - et on dirait un film dont le son s'est enrayé, toutes ces bouches ouvertes dont il ne sort rien, toute cette clameur qui n'est qu'une image, et le vainqueur, déjà vaincu, seul au milieu de son silence…"
— Jean Anouilh

"Every reiteration of the idea that _nothing matters_ debases the human spirit.

Every reiteration of the idea that there is no drama in modern life, there is only dramatization, that there is no tragedy, there is only unexplained misfortune, debases us. It denies what we know to be true. In denying what we know, we are as a nation which cannot remember its dreams--like an unhappy person who cannot remember his dreams and so denies that he does dream, and denies that there are such things as dreams."
— David Mamet (Writing in Restaurants: Essays and Prose)

"Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
— Jean Racine

"History is orphan. It can speak, but cannot hear. It can give, but cannot take. Its wounds and tragedies can be read and known, but cannot be avoided or cured."
— Kedar Joshi

"If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly."
— Alan Lightman (Einstein's Dreams)

"What give all that is tragic, whatever its form, the characteristic of the sublime, is the first inkling of the knowledge that the world and life can give no satisfaction, and are not worth our investment in them. The tragic spirit consists in this. Accordingly it leads to resignation."
— Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation, 1 of 2)

"Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it."
— Lenny Bruce (The Essential Lenny Bruce)

"I gave them hope, and so turned away their eyes from death"
— Aeschylus (Prometheus Bound)

"As a lord was held
for the strength of his body and stoutness of heart.
Much lore he learned, and loved wisdom
but fortune followed him in few desires;
oft wrong and awry what he wrought turned;
what he loved he lost, what he longed for he won not;
and full friendship he found not easily,
nor was lightly loved for his looks were sad.
He was gloom-hearted, and glad seldom
for the sundering sorrow that filled his youth...
(On Turin Turambar - The Children of Hurin)"
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lays of Beleriand)

""A darkness different from Ember's, but just as frightening...""
— Jeanne DuPrau (The Diamond of Darkhold (The Ember Series, #4))

"It is the custom on the stage: in all good, murderous melodramas: to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon. The hero sinks upon his straw bed, weighed down by fetters and misfortunes; and, in the next scene, his faithful but unconscious squire regales the audience with a comic song. We behold, with throbbing bosoms, the heroine in the grasp of a proud and ruthless baron: her virtue and her life alike in danger; drawing forth a dagger to preserve the one at the cost of the other; and, just as our expectations are wrought up to the highest pitch, a whistle is heard: and we are straightway transported to the great hall of the castle: where a grey-headed seneschal sings a funny chorus with a funnier body of vassals, who are free of all sorts of places from church vaults to palaces, and roam about in company, carolling perpetually.

Such changes appear absurd; but they are not so unnatural as they would seem at first sight. The transitions in real life from well-spread boards to death-beds, and from mourning weeds to holiday garments, are not a whit less startling; only, there, we are busy actors, instead of passive lookers-on; which makes a vast difference. The actors in the mimic life of the theatre, are blind to violent transitions and abrupt impulses of passion or feeling, which, presented before the eyes of mere spectators, are at once condemned as outrageous and preposterous."
— Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist)

"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."
— Kedar Joshi

"There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it."
— George Bernard Shaw

"Appalling numbers of youth have been led into a cynical ultra-sophisticated attitude which regards drinking as a badge of social aptitude, which makes a fetish of sport and professes eroticism as a way of life. A perverted and insane pictorial art, lewd exhibitionistic dancing and jungle music form the spiritual norm of this sector of America's youth. "
— Francis Parker Yockey

"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.
"
— Mel Brooks

"The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy. "
— Steven Weinberg

"To be,or not to be,that is the question"
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)