The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.

Writers of comedy have outlook, whereas writers of tragedy have, according to them, insight.

Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.

Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilised world.

In tragedy great men are more truly great than in history. We see them only in the crises which unfold them.

A tragic life is romantic when it happens to somebody else.

It's not the tragedies that kill us, it's the messes.

The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.

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

A tragic writer does not have to believe in God, but he must believe in man.

Tragedy and comedy are simply questions of value; a little misfit in life makes us laugh; a great one is tragedy and cause for expression of grief.

I suspect tragedy in the American countryside because all the people capable of it move to the big towns at twenty.

One cannot balance tragedy in the scales Unless one weighs it with the tragic heart.

Only a great mind overthrown yields tragedy.

Why is it that man desires to be made sad, beholding doleful and tragical things, which yet himself would by no means suffer?

A tragedy means always a mans struggle with that which is stronger than man.

Tragedy, no matter how sad, becomes boring to those not caught in its addictive caress.

The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.