This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Your true... tragedy is enacted on the stage of a man’s soul, and with the man’s reasons as lone auditor.
Tragedy |
It is the tragedy of the world that no one knows what they don't know; and the less a person knows, the more sure they are that they know everything.
God is the source and goal of ideals by which to live triumphantly in the face of starkest grief. The sufferer who finds God as the strength and mainstay of his life does not merely acquiesce before the inevitable with stoic fortitude. He looks the tragedy in the face, and looks up to new heights of spiritual beauty to which he may mount by using his grief as a stairway to God’s glory.
Beauty | Fortitude | Glory | God | Grief | Ideals | Inevitable | Life | Life | Looks | Stoic | Strength | Tragedy | Beauty | God |
The real tragedy is that we’re all human beings, and human beings have a sense of dignity. Any domination by one human over another leads to a loss of some part of his dignity. Is one’s dignity that big it can be crumbled away like that?
Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley
The future must have as its basis the consciousness of sanctity in existence – in common things, in the events of human life, in the gradually comprehended interlocking whole revealed to the human desire for knowledge, n the benedictions of beauty and love, in the catharsis, the sacred purging, of the moral drama in which character is pitted against fate and even deepest tragedy may uplift the mind.
Beauty | Character | Consciousness | Desire | Events | Existence | Fate | Future | Knowledge | Life | Life | Love | Mind | Sacred | Tragedy | Fate | Beauty |
The tragedy of our time is “the treason of the clerks,” that is, the failure of our best minds to give themselves to contemplation of truth, and their undue preoccupation with immediate problems to the neglect of the deeper problems.
Contemplation | Failure | Neglect | Problems | Time | Tragedy | Treason | Truth | Failure | Contemplation |
The successful cannot always prevent a tragedy around them, but they can prevent it from becoming a tragedy within them.
Tragedy |
I’m learning the difference between humor and comedy, between the laugh that lasts forever and the one that evaporates as soon as it hits the air. Humor is giving, and comedy is taking away. Humor is companionable, comedy cold. Humor is character, comedy personality.
Character | Comedy | Giving | Humor | Learning | Personality |
The tragedy of modern Jewish life is not anti-Semitism, but the loss of the sense of the worthwhileness of being a Jew.
Nicholas D. Kristof, fully Nicholas Donabet Kristof
It feels unseemly to defend the vaporizing of two cities, events that are regarded in some quarters among the most monstrous acts of the twentieth century. But we owe it to history to appreciate that the greatest tragedy of Hiroshima was not that so many people were incinerated in an instant, but that in a complex and brutal world, the alternatives were worse.
The tragedy of life is not found in failure but complacency. Not in you doing too much, but doing too little. Not in you living above your means, but below your capacity. Never failure but low aim, is life greatest tragedy.
Capacity | Complacency | Failure | Life | Life | Little | Means | Tragedy | Failure |
Each generation leaves its own mark on the sands of time. It is always a tragedy when a new generation accepts as final what has been done in the past, thus denying itself the right to explore and develop new paths, new insights, and new responses to life and living.