Tragedy Quotes - Page 24

The tragedy with velocity as the answer to complexity is that, after awhile, you cannot see or comprehend anything that is not traveling at the same speed you are. And you actually start to feel disturbed by people who have a sense of restfulness to their existence.

It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be nothing more than the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump.

The pursuit of Fashion is the attempt of the middle class to co-opt tragedy. In adopting the clothing, speech, and personal habits of those in straitened, dangerous, or pitiful circumstances, the middle class seeks to have what it feels to be the exigent and nonequivocal experiences had by those it emulates.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

We simply prefer to deny death or tragedy at all costs and, with it, a fundamental aspect of life. We do this instead of acknowledging that suffering represents one of the strongest incentives of life, which is the base of human solidarity and what brings intensity to happiness.

Ill never forget Hurricane Katrina - the mix of a natural and a man-made catastrophe that resulted in the death of over 1,500 of our neighbors. Millions of folks were marked by the tragedy.

When the systems we expect to help us actually hurt us, we have tragedy.

The tragedy is that everyone thinks they already have goals. But what they really have are hopes and wishes.

...the tragedy of consumerism: one acquires more and more things without taking the time to ever see and know them, and thus one never truly enjoys them. One has without truly having. The consumer is right-there is pleasure to be had in good things, a sacred and almost unspeakable pleasure, but the consumer wrongly thinks that one finds this pleasure by having more and more possessions instead of possessing them more truly through grateful contemplation. And here we are, living in an economy that perpetuates this tragedy.

Tragedy enlightens - and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man's freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies.

Lack of something to feel important about is almost the greatest tragedy a man may have.

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. However valuable-even necessary-that may have been in enforcing good behavior on primitive peoples, their association is now counterproductive. Yet at the very moment when they should be decoupled, sanctimonious nitwits are calling for a return to morals based on superstition.

The true end of tragedy is to purify the passions.

Can one be fully human without experiencing tragedy? The only tragedy there is in the world is ignorance; all evil comes from that.

In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of Shakespearean Tragedy.

For many years, I did pantomime with Marcel Marceau. I was a writer for him and got to know very well how to use the body for illustration. I wanted to do a mother without arms, but using the arms of her son in Santa Sangre. The tragedy should always have something funny. Something weird.

In modern European thought a tragedy is occurring in that the original bonds uniting the affirmative attitude towards the world with ethics are, by a slow but irresistible process, loosening and finally parting. Out of my life and Thought.

I fear that the impact of university censorship and university denial of due process will be to mis-educate a generation of students away from core values of civil liberties and constitutional safeguards. Students who have been led to believe by university administrators and faculty that censorship and denial of due process are acceptable norms will be more susceptible to accepting those norms in their post-university lives. That would be a tragedy for America.

I do not recall another period when ‘faith’ was as popular as it is today. ‘If only we believe hard enough we'll make it somehow.’ So goes the popular chant. What you believe is not important. Only believe... What is overlooked in all this is that faith is good only when it engages truth; when it is made to rest upon falsehood it can and often does lead to eternal tragedy. For it is not enough that we believe; we must believe the right thing about the right One.

That is why most great love stories are tragedies.

It is a tragedy of the Germanic world that Jesus was Judaised, distorted, falsified; and an alien Asiatic spirit was forced upon us. That is a crime we must repair.

The legalized liquor business is the tragedy of our civilization. Alcohol is the greatest and most blighting curse of our modern civilization. The liquor seller is simply and only a privileged malefactor - a criminal.

Poetry, like jazz, is one of those dazzling diamonds of creative industry that help human beings make sense out of the comedies and tragedies that contextualize our lives.

The past in retrospect holds manifold disenchantments, failures and even tragedies; and yet the worse may be forgotten and the best held fast.

September 11 stands on its own as a terrible tragedy.