Quotes About Tragedy

I also happened to identify with Julien Sorel. Sorel's basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy.

Only by taking his own life was my uncle able to recover his humanity.

The genres were Romance in Michelet, Comedy in Ranke, Tragedy in Tocqueville, and Satire in Burckhardt.

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.

We are able to become lovers of God because He already accepts us. We may think we know ourselves, but when we do not accept ourselves, we only prove how little we understand. What a tragedy! The truth is that the God of the universe loves us deeply. We are covered in His blood. That is what allows us to know and love Him. When we understand this fully, we will walk in holiness and be altogether healed.

Aufmunternd sprach ich: »Ihr lieben Leut', Ihr müßt nicht jammern und flennen; Troja war eine bessere Stadt Und mußte doch verbrennen.

In Santiago, the capital of the kingdom of Chile, at the moment of the great earthquake of 1647 in which many thousands lost their lives, a young Spaniard called Jeronimo Rugera was standing beside one of the pillars in the prison to which he had been committed on a criminal charge, and he was about to hang himself.

For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews. It can also be other people.

I don't think I'm morbid by nature. Serious writers have always written about serious subjects. Lighthearted material doesn't appeal to me, and I don't read it. I think I'm a realist, with a realistic sensibility of history and the tragedy of history.

I'm very proud of 'Will the Sun Ever Shine Again.' That was a song written very close to the 9/11 event.

Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.

Discrimination due to age is one of the great tragedies of modern life. The desire to work and be useful is what makes life worth living, and to be told your efforts are not needed because you are the wrong age is a crime.

It's wrong for parents to bury their children. It should be the other way around.

Sometimes terrible things just happen to the wrong people.

I lost three cousins and a best friend, and they all came at the wrong time. Everyone told me to be strong and that they were in a better place. But I didn't want to hear that. They were gone and I will never see them again.

I wrote the song For A Dancer for a friend of mine who died in a fire. He was in the sauna in a house that burned down, so he had no idea anything was going on. It was very sad.

It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer.

Shakespeare wrote all there is that we need to know about dementia in 'King Lear.'

I think there's a poet who wrote once a tragedy by Shakespeare, a symphony by Beethoven and a thunderstorm are based on the same elements. I think that's a beautiful line.

I'm obsessed with history, especially WWII and the Jews in Europe during the Holocaust.

When I was writing my first book, 'In Harm's Way,' I witnessed the sense of sacrifice that those WWII veterans possessed. I was surprised that sometimes their grandchildren hadn't talked to them about the historic events of that night in July 1945, when the USS Indianapolis went down.

One day, when we were coming back from school, we saw this big cloud of smoke coming up, and all these fire-trucks in the yard. The garage was burning down. I was 14, and we'd lost everything.

I don't even think I was quite a year old. My mother was maybe seven months pregnant with my little brother. I was sucked out of her arms, and she landed 75 yards away from our trailer and had a ruptured disc. The tornado set me down on top of this pile of corrugated lumber and scrap metal.

I love the story behind the Vasa Museum: in the 17th century, the Swedish king was trying to make a statement by building a huge ship that would sail around Europe carrying the Swedish flag and proving that we were a force to be reckoned with, and basically, the ship was top-heavy, and so it went 300 or so yards and sank.