Definition of Tragedy

Tragedy

A dramatic poem, composed in elevated style, representing a signal action performed by some person or persons, and having a fatal issue; that species of drama which represents the sad or terrible phases of character and life.

A fatal and mournful event; any event in which human lives are lost by human violence, more especially by unauthorized violence.

Related Definitions:

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Tragedy Quotations

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.
Oscar Wilde

I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.
Oscar Wilde

The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy.
John F. Kennedy

Life's Tragedy is that we get old to soon and wise too late.
Benjamin Franklin

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
Karl Marx

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.
Henry David Thoreau

A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude. A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.
Aristotle

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
Plato

Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.
Karl Marx

One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.
Joseph Stalin

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.
Charlie Chaplin

Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.
Erma Bombeck

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.
Joseph Stalin

The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we're passing one another without a look of recognition.
Henry Miller

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
Aldous Huxley

Losing a game is heartbreaking. Losing your sense of excellence or worth is a tragedy.
Joe Paterno

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

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly.
Richard Bach

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
H. L. Mencken

The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations.
Adam Smith

A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.
James Madison

There's no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.
Robert Kennedy

You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.
Vaclav Havel

Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.
Lenny Bruce

Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
William Butler Yeats

More Tragedy Quotations

Tragedy Translations

tragedy in Afrikaans is tragedie
tragedy in Dutch is tragisch
tragedy in Italian is tragedia, tragedia
tragedy in Spanish is tragedia
tragedy in Swedish is tragedi

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