'Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Æschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d'Urberville knights and ...
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If I was telling that story in a '50s style, it would have been a melodrama, ... a story of 'An innocent girl falls into the seedy, sordid world of bondage and then sees the light and is born again.' If I were telling it now in an urban, sophisticated way, you would have a story about a girl who is a free spirit, who does these lighthearted bondage photos, then she crashes and she turns to religion which would be the tragedy in the modern view, because it's so polarized now that people see any religion as representing the horrible forces of puritanism. I was trying to comment on the sad confusion surrounding sex at that time, present it in a complex way, and give her religion a fair hearing too.
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The common good of a collective -- a race, a class, a state -- was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men. Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism? Does the fault lie in men's hypocrisy or in the nature of the principle? The most dreadful butchers were the most sincere. The believed in the perfect society reached through the guillotine and the firing squad. Nobody questioned their right to murder since they were murdering for an altruistic purpose. It was accepted that man must be sacrificed for other men. Actors change, but the course of the tragedy remains the same. A humanitarian who starts with the declarations of love for mankind and ends with a sea of blood. It goes on and will go on so long as men believe that an action is good if it is unselfish. That permits the altruist to act and forces his victims to bear it. The leaders of collectivist movements ask nothing of themselves. But observe the results.
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A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to Farce, or a Tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance. and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
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If you think only of yourself, if you forget the rights and well-being of others, or, worse still, if you exploit others, ultimately you will lose. You will have no friends who will show concern for your well-being. Moreover, if a tragedy befalls you, instead of feeling concerned, others might even secretly rejoice. By contrast, if an individual is compassionate and altruistic, and has the interests of others in mind, then irrespective of whether that person knows a lot of people, wherever that person moves, he or she will immediately make friends. And when that person faces a tragedy, there will be plenty of people who will come to help.
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The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.
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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?
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An American tragedy in which we all have played a part. (On Watergate, announcing pardon of former President Richard M Nixon)
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The alienation effect in German epic theater is achieved not only through the actors, but also through music (chorus and song) and sets (trans...
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The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment but it is no less than a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy.
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Grief and tragedy and hatred are only for a time. Goodness, remembrance and love have no end, and the Lord of life holds all who die and all who mourn.
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The law demands good works and uses its terror--rejection, shame, fear of punishment, unanswered prayer, personal tragedy, etc.--as motivation. Here performance is a necessity to secure the blessings and avoid the curses. Grace, on the other hand, allows us to serve on a different basis--not from fear but on the basis of love and gratitude, from appreciation and gladness for blessings freely given and freely received.
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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.
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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 the butterfly.
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The theater-goer in conventional dramatic theater says: Yes, I've felt that way, too. That's the way I am. That's life. That's the way it will...
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You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.
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The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
Life
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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.
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History is moving, and it will tend toward hope, or tend toward tragedy.
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For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews.
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Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
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The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
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What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
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The earth is mankind's ultimate haven, our blessed terra firma. When it trembles and gives way beneath our feet, it's as though one of God's checks has bounced.
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The popularity of disaster movies expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.
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The American male at the peak of his physical powers and appetites, driving 160 big white horses across the scenes of an increasingly open society, with weekend money in his pocket and with little prior exposure to trouble and tragedy, personifies an accident going to happen.
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Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot
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Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.
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The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.
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Life is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.
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