A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.
The tragedy of this life is not failure, but low aim.
The other thing Aron found about sensitive people is that sometimes they're highly empathic. It's as if they have thinner boundaries separating them from other people's emotions and from the tragedies and cruelties of the world. They tend to have unusually strong consciences. . . . they're acutely aware of the consequences of a lapse in their own behavior.
I have long suspected that the power of speech is not a power at all, but a mere form of hysteria from which the living that really know the truth never suffer because they do not fear life or death as we do and can afford to be calm and silent. The frailest flower that blooms knows that it will rise from the dead in the next season's sun, breathe, feel again the dew and rain. Therefore these little ones make no such tragedy as we do of death.
One of my da's tragedies was always the fact that he was bright enough to understand just how comprehensively he had shat all over his life.
I want to make it clear that I do not judge or condemn any woman who has had an abortion, but every abortion is a tragedy and up to 100,000 abortions a year is this generation's legacy of unutterable shame.
The tragedy of modern democracies is that they have not yet succeeded in effecting democracy.
The utter failure came at the Crucifixion in the tragic words, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' If you want to understand the full tragedy of those words you must realize what they meant: Christ saw that his whole life, devoted to the truth according to his best conviction, had been a terrible illusion. He had lived it to the full absolutely sincerely, he had made his honest experiment, but it was nevertheless a compensation. On the cross his mission deserted him. But because he had lived so fully and devotedly he won through to the Resurrection body.
Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.
Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the hungry hours.
The tragedy of music is that it begins with perfection.
It [911 tragedy] has affected us on so many levels: economically, morally, spiritually, ethically. It's been all over the place. A new American identity emerged - we now live in a very different America. This is the power of the definitive event.
I love you. " Z squeezed his eyes shut. "Don't be a tragedy, Bella.
She wondered if maybe tragedy was what it took to make your heart capable of admitting a new member.
There are some great roles mostly in Shakespeare's tragedies which no one can play at full strength from beginning to end. One simply hopes that one can hit the peaks as often as one has the strength.
I knew that the deepest of tragedies was simple: to love, and not to be loved in return.
The tragedy in our colleges and seminaries right now is that we turn men out who know the word of God. That is never going to turn the world. The question is not whether they know the Word of God. . . . The question is. . . . . . Do they know the God of the Word?
Money talks. It starts rumors about careers and complicity and speaks of the tragedies and triumphs of our social lives.
The decaying that had dragged on for too long had only turned tragedy into nuisance; death, when it strikes, better completes its annihilating act on the first try.
Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting.