The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase, Let no one be called happy till his death; to which I would add, Let no one, till his death be called unhappy.
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We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilisation surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees there by a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. The animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.
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Boxing has become America's tragic theater.
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Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shore, the scar of our racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations.
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As I rejected amnesty, so I reject revenge. I ask all Americans who ever asked for goodness and mercy in their lives, who ever sought forgiveness for their trespasses, to join in rehabilitating all the casualties of the tragic conflict of the past. (On Americans who avoided conscription during the Vietnam War, to Veterans of Foreign Wars)
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We're here to offer a public witness against a state-mandated undermining of the institution of marriage. Oct. 1 is a tragic day because it's the first day a law goes into effect that states a legislative belief that children don't need both a mom and a dad.
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A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed ...
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It is not possible, for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life.... [ellipsis in source] Il...
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Among all the tragic consequences of depression and war, this suppression of personal self-expression through one's life work is among the most poignant.
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If American politics does not look to you like a joke, a tragic dance; if you have enough blindness left in you, on any plea, on any excuse, to vote for the Democratic Party or the Republican Party (for at present machine and party are one), or for any candidate who does not stand for a new era, -- then you yourself pass into the slide of the magic-lantern; you are an exhibit, a quaint product, a curiosity of the American soil. You are part of the problem.
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Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents has been always tragic, chiefly as an almost indecent excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carion.
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But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.
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I think it is a kind of subject matter that needed exploring ... the identity of the single woman had not caught up with what was happening. Which was that a lot of perfectly attractive, intelligent, nice, normal girls in their 30s had decided not to get married for very good reasons. And they were paralyzed somewhere between the Cosmo girls, you know with the good life and their own flat and car and independence and lots of fun, and haunted by this horrible image of ... the tragic spinster who ends up dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by a dog.
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I have spent more than half a lifetime trying to express the tragic moment.
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If American politics does not look to you like a joke, a tragic dance; if you have enough blindness left in you, on any plea, on any excuse, t...
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It's better known as 'The Great Halftime Flush. It's equal to all the water which tumbles over Niagara Falls in seven minutes. The Halftime Flush -- that's very serious business. I mean, you've got 90 million Americans flushing toilets. You could have a tragic clogging problem in America.
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The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
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The people of Western Europe are facing this summer a series of tragic dilemmas. Of the hopes that dazzled the last twenty years that some pol...
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The whole campaign was a tragic case of mistaken identity.
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Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
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It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work -- the night watchman.
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The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.
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The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road.
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Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
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Frank It's the same old story. Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl, girls dies in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day.
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Take death for example. A great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it. We make extraordinary efforts to delay it, and often consider its intrusion a tragic event. Yet we’d find it hard to live without it. Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.
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There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth
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Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized by a madness which forces them to commit the very acts which made it certain that what they dread shall happen.
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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 blooming outside our windows today.
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Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy --common clay, if you like --eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others --the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes.
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