It is restful, tragedy, because one knows that there is no more lousy hope left. You know you're caught, caught at last like a rat with all the world on its back. And the only thing left to do is shout -- not moan, or complain, but yell out at the top of your voice whatever it was you had to say. What you've never said before. What perhaps you don't even know till now.
~ Jean Anouilh

The true end of tragedy is to purify the passions.
~ Aristotle

Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
~ Antonin Artaud

Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.
~ Jacques Barzun

I've never thought of my characters as being sad. On the contrary, they are full of life. They didn't choose tragedy. Tragedy chose them.
~ Juliette Binoche

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon--instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.
~ Dale Carnegie

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
~ E. M. Cioran

The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives -- the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in yourself.
~ Norman Cousins

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
~ Edith Hamilton

The greatest tragedy in America is not the destruction of our natural resources, though that tragedy is great. The truly great tragedy is the destruction of our human resources by our failure to fully utilize our abilities, which means that most men and women go to their graves with their music still in them.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

What the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending.
~ William Dean Howells

We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look.
~ Aldous Huxley

I've come to realize that life is not a musical comedy, it's a Greek tragedy.
~ Billy Joel

When any calamity has been suffered, the first thing to be remembered is how much has been escaped.
~ Samuel Johnson

There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.
~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
~ D. H. Lawrence

Tragedy is like strong acid -- it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.
~ D. H. Lawrence

Commonplace people dislike tragedy because they dare not suffer and cannot exult.
~ John Masefield

The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.
~ Arthur Miller

It was no great tragedy being Judy Garland's daughter. I had tremendously interesting childhood years -- except they had little to do with being a child.
~ Liza Minnelli