This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Tragedy is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery. All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not a quality. Character gives us qualities, but it is our actions - what we do - that we are happy or the reverse." - Aristotle NULL
"Comedy aims at representing men as worse, and tragedy as better than in real life." - Aristotle NULL
"In tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is a moment." - Christopher Fry
"Tragedy and comedy are simply questions of value; a little misfit in life makes us laugh; a great one is tragedy and cause for expression of grief." - Elbert Green Hubbard
"Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. They are born with the tragedy that they have to grow up . . . a lot of people don't have the courage to do it." - Helen Hayes
"There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility." - Jacob Bronowski
"If we lacked imagination enough to foresee something better, life would indeed be a tragedy." - Laurence J. Peter, fully Laurence Johnston Peter
"It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind." - Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
"If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some false friends and true enemies; succeed anyway. If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; be honest and frank anyway. If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous; be happy anyway. The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow; do good anyway… You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God; it was never between you and them anyway." - Mother Teresa, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu NULL
"Death is not the greatest loss in life... 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 death of the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in yourself." - Norman Cousins
"The tragedy of life is not death but in what dies inside a man while he lives - the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the death of awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in oneself." - Norman Cousins
"The tragedy of life is not death, but what we let die inside of us while we live." - Norman Cousins
"The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young." - Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy is when men are afraid of the light." - Plato NULL
"In all the tragedy and comedy of life, pain is mixed with pleasure." - Plato NULL
"Do not fear to put novels into the hands of young people as an occasional holiday experiment, but above all, good poetry in all kinds - epic, tragedy, lyric. If we can touch the imagination, we serve them; they will never forget it." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Tragedy seems to consist in temperament, not in events. There are natures so doomed that no prosperity can soothe their ragged and disheveled desolation." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly." - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
"Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live." - Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy
"The tragedy of ignorance is its complacency." - Robert Quillen, fully Verni Robert Quillen
"If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment." - Susan Sontag
"That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy, were it to happen more than twenty times in a minute, as by some computations it does." - Thomas Carlyle
"The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss." - Thomas Carlyle
"The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul." - William Butler Yeats
"The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals. " - Edward Paul Abbey
"The metaphysical comfort - with which, I am suggesting even now, every true tragedy leaves us - that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable - this comfort appears in the incarnate clarity in the chorus of satyrs, a chorus of natural being who live ineradicably, as it were behind all civilization and remain eternally the same, despite the changes of generations and of the history of nations." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Orthodoxy is summoned to witness. Now more than ever the Christian West stands before divergent prospects, a living question addressed also to the Orthodox world… The ‘old polemical theology' has long ago lost its inner connection with any reality. Such theology was an academic discipline, and was always elaborated according to the same western 'textbooks.' A historiosophical exegesis of the western religious tragedy must become the new 'polemical theology.' But this tragedy must be reendured and relived, precisely as one's own, and its potential catharsis must be demonstrated in the fullness of the experience of the Church and patristic tradition. In this newly sought Orthodox synthesis, the centuries-old experience of the Catholic West must be studied and diagnosed by Orthodox theology with greater care and sympathy than has been the case up to now… The Orthodox theologian must also offer his own testimony to this world—a testimony arising from the inner memory of the Church—and resolve the question with his historical findings." - Georges Florovsky, fully Georges Vasilievich Florovsky
"While we have the gift of life, it seems to me the only tragedy is to allow part of us to die - whether it is our spirit, our creativity or our glorious uniqueness. " - Gilda Radner, fully Gilda Susan Radner
"There are two aspects of individual harmony: the harmony between body and soul, and the harmony between individuals. All the tragedy in the world, in the individual and in the multitude, comes from lack of harmony. And harmony is the best given by producing harmony in one's own life." - Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
"In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood. " - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Life is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel. " - Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Oxford
"This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel." - Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Oxford
"If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic." - Irvin David Yalom
"We fail to wonder... This is the tragedy of every man... Life is routine, and routine is resistance to the wonder. Awe is an act of insight into a meaning greater than ourselves... The beginning of awe is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is awe... Awe is a way of being in rapport with the mystery of all reality... Awe precedes faith; it is at the root of faith. We must grow in awe in order to reach faith... The ineffable inhabits the magnificent and the common, the grandiose and the tiny facts of reality alike... Slight and simple things may be a glimpse of God? kinship with the spirit of being? an eternal flash of a will?" - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"Force, always a tragedy for both user and the one upon which it is used, has become less and less effective in deciding political matters." - Jonathan Schell, fully Jonathan Edward Schell
"[Comedies], in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man…. Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachments to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible." - Joseph Campbell
"It is a tragedy when the mind, soul and heart are in slavery in a way of life which refuses to recognize that people have rights before God. It is a war which makes hate a badge of honor, slavery the keystone to prosperity. Not to resist would make one an accomplice to crime.... We must resist oppression and tyranny. We have to end it no matter what it costs." - Joseph R. Sizoo
"For me, the principal fact of life is the free mind. For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity. A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment. " - Joyce Cary
"And, in fact, if these crimes appeal less to the senses, they appeal more to the mind; and the mind, in the last analysis, is the profoundest part of us. For the novelist, therefore, there is a new type of tragedy to be derived from these crimes, more intellectual than physical in character, which do not really seem to be crimes to the superficial judgement of old materialistic societies because they do not involve bloodshed, and murder is committed only in the sphere of feelings and manners." - Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly
"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
"In circumstances of real tragedy you see things straight away...past, present, and future together." - Louis-Ferdinand Céline, pen name Louis-Ferdinand Destouches
"There is such a place as fairyland - but only children can find the way to it. And they do not know that it is fairyland until they have grown so old that they forget the way. One bitter day, when they seek it and cannot find it, they realize what they have lost; and that is the tragedy of life. On that day the gates of Eden are shut behind them and the age of gold is over. Henceforth they must dwell in the common light of common day. Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again; and blessed are they above mortals. They, and only they, can bring us tidings from that dear country where we once sojourned and from which we must evermore be exiles. The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland." - Lucy Maud Montgomery, aka Maud or L.M. Montgomery
"Humor is tragedy plus time." - Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
"The tragedy of life is not that man loses, but that he almost wins." - Heywood Broun, fully Matthew Heywood Campbell Broun
"And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity." - Miguel de Unamuno, fully Miguel de Unamuno y Jogo
"Killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity." - Miguel de Unamuno, fully Miguel de Unamuno y Jogo
"The tragedy of being both rational and animal seems to consist in having to choose between duty and desire rather than in making any particular choice." - Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler