Greek Tragedy Quotes

Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man: those four million souls whom the nation had used and degraded, and on whom the South had built an oligarchy similar to the colonial imperialism of today, erected on cheap colored labor and raising raw material for manufacture. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

I am Cassandra - she who, without asking,
understood it all and still came to her fate,
I, Cassandra, full of visions,
who sees her own death without turning away,
and hears in the night the day that follows. ~ Gabriela Mistral

ORESTES: Never shall I see you again.

ELECTRA: Nor I see myself in your eyes.

ORESTES: This, the last time I'll talk with you ever.

ELECTRA: O my homeland, goodbye. Goodbye to you, women of home.

ORESTES: Most loyal of sisters, do you leave now?

ELECTRA: I leave with tears blurring all that I see. ~ Euripides

In Greek tragedy, 'Destiny is Character' that means destiny drives or guides the hero. In Shakespearean tragedy, 'Character is Destiny' that means the hero creates his own destiny! But, real life is a mixture of both! ~ Md. Ziaul Haque

But when a god sends harm, no man can sidestep it, no matter how strong he may be. ~ Sophocles

Sometimes bad luck hits you like in an ancient Greek tragedy, and it's not your own making. When you have a plane crash, it's not your fault. ~ Werner Herzog

Of most dreadful suffering, I am the cause. ~ Euripides

[A]s Agatha Swanburne once said, 'To be kept waiting is unfortunate, but to be kept waiting with nothing interesting to read is a tragedy of Greek proportions. ~ Maryrose Wood

By dread things I am compelled. I know that. I see the trap closing. I know what I am. But while life is in me I will not stop this violence. No. Oh my friends who is there to comfort me? Who understands? Leave me be, let me go, do not soothe me. This is a knot no one can untie. There will be no rest, there is no retrieval. No number exists for griefs like these. ~ Sophocles

Blind hope. Blind hope is all we have. There's a Greek tragedy called Prometheus Bound; Prometheus is the [titan] that gave humans fire. He's chained to a rock and bemoaning his fate and saying, "I gave you everything. By giving you fire, I gave you blind hope. By giving you a little light that kept you warm at night, I let you believe that this was all going to be okay." For me, that's what art has been. Music and books, it's an act of hope to make them, and it's an act of hope to listen to them. That hope will be dashed, you will say goodbye. ~ Torquil Campbell

The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

My mother exaggerates as often as she can. I'm sure she would like nothing more than to be part of a Greek tragedy. She wouldn't even want a large part, she'd be perfectly content with a chorus role, warning that fate is coming to make havoc of all things. ~ Helen Oyeyemi

What troubled people especially was not just the tragedy--or even the needlessness--but the element of fate in it all. If the Titanic had heeded any of the six ice messages on Sunday . . . if ice conditions had been normal . . . if the night had been rough or moonlit . . . if she had seen the berg 15 second sooner--or 15 seconds later . . . if she had hit the ice any other way . . . if her watertight bulkheads had been one deck higher . . . if she had carried enough boats . . . if the Californian had only come. Had any one of these "ifs" turned out right, every life might have been save. But they all went against her--a classic Greek tragedy. ~ Walter Lord

I think American drama is at its best when it takes the domestic and makes it epic, like a Greek tragedy in the front room. ~ Anne-Marie Duff

Apollo, Apollo - but he is my lord. I will keep silence. He is wise forever, though his oracle spoke brutal words. We are bound to acquiesce. And you must do now as Fate and Zeus ordain. ~ Euripides

I'd three times sooner go to war than suffer childbirth once. ~ Euripides

It has all the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I have not been wounded. ~ Oscar Wilde

Yes, blood for blood, his bitter loan came due. He paid with death. ~ Euripides

In some ways grief anonymizes as powerfully as a Greek tragedy mask. ~ Tana French

We all know what tragedy is. "Yes, I'd rather not have any more tragedy, please. I'll have comedy, please." Comedy, in the Greek sense, only means that it has a happy ending. ~ Eric Drooker

For my money, noir boils down to bleak humanism – or, to put it more plainly: shit options, bad decisions, and dire
consequences. The difference between Greek tragedy and noir ain't the height of the fall, but the reason: those who fall in Greek tragedy do so because they're destined to; those who fall in noir choose to their damn selves.

In short, free will's a bitch.
But regardless of whose definition you go with, you'll notice something's lacking: namely, any mention of genre. That's because for as much as noir's assumed to be a subset of crime fiction, it's more vibe than subgenre. And, as many an enterprising modern writer seems intent on proving, that vibe is one that plays just as well with fantasy and science fiction as it does with crime. ~ Chris Holm

Who can stop grief's avalanche once it starts to roll. ~ Euripides

When it's good, it's the best and most beautiful thing I've ever experienced. So good, that it makes me feel bad for people who haven't had the honor. But when it's bad, it's bad, Nikki. A goddamn Greek tragedy. It's horrific. And really fucking scary. He scares me.
But those good times ... I'll take the bad just so I can have the good. Because the good is outstanding. So, if you must know, I'm going with the flow and taking it as it comes. ~ Belle Aurora

In childbirth grief begins. ~ Euripides

What greater sorrow than being forced to leave behind my native earth? ~ Euripides

Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved. ~ Joseph Campbell

You are young and young your rule and you think that the tower in which you live is free from sorrow: from it have I not seen two tyrants thrown? The third, who now is king, I shall yet live to see him fall, of all three most suddenly, most dishonored. ~ Aeschylus

Again, again your mind has changed course with the wind. For you think now of godly things ignored when you worked dreadful deeds on your brother against his will. ~ Euripides

In fact, however, Nietzsche's very first book, The Birth, constitutes a declaration of independence from Schopenhauer: while Nietzsche admires him for honestly facing up to the terrors of existence, Nietzsche himself celebrates Greek tragedy as a superior alternative to Schopenhauer's "Buddhistic negation of the will." From tragedy Nietzsche learns that one can affirm life as sublime, beautiful, and joyous in spite of all suffering and cruelty. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Old loves are dropped when new ones come ~ Euripides

Laughter and weeping, the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy, mark the extremes of a continuous spectrum; both provide channels for the overflow of emotion; both are ~ Arthur Koestler

I've come to realize that life is not a musical comedy, it's a Greek tragedy. ~ Billy Joel

People try to make a Greek tragedy of my life, and they can't do it. I'm too happy. ~ Curt Flood

I'm running out of time, and a Western is America's answer to a Greek tragedy, so that's what we did. [Kiefer] hired Brad [Mirman] to write the script and he had the ideas, and then he and I did stuff on the script to make it a little cleaner to ourselves. And then, we played it. We were just actors working together, and our DNA must have informed it somehow. Certainly, we came out of it purified a little bit. ~ Donald Sutherland

Hero," said Machaon to his sister who was still muttering to her gods. "Please stop. Surely the gods would have heard you by now … let's try not to annoy them. ~ Sulari Gentill

I told myself that historically when people do too well too quickly, they are a Greek tragedy waiting to happen. ~ Anne Lamott

The hounds snap fierce at your heels. Turn toward Athens. I hear them pelting hard on you, I see black flesh and snake-hands coiling round a fruit of agonizing pain. ~ Euripides

Ten thousand men possess ten thousand hopes. A few bear fruit in happiness; the others go awry. But he who garners day by day the good life, he is happiest. ~ Gilbert Murray

The theater of man is not always 'amusing', but it is always theater, and theater can be marveled at even when its content is somber and harsh. You're acquainted with Greek tragedy? ~ Tom Robbins

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

The satyr, as the Dionysiac chorist, dwells in a reality sanctioned by myth and ritual. That tragedy should begin with him, that the Dionysiac wisdom of tragedy should speak through him, is as puzzling a phenomenon as, more generally, the origin of tragedy from the chorus. Perhaps we can gain a starting point for this inquiry by claiming that the satyr, that fictive nature sprite, stands to cultured man in the same relation as Dionysian music does to civilization. Richard Wagner has said of the latter that it is absorbed by music as lamplight by daylight. In the same manner, I believe, the cultured Greek felt himself absorbed into the satyr chorus, and in the next development of Greek tragedy state and society, in fact everything that separates man from man, gave way before an overwhelming sense of unity that led back into the heart of nature. This metaphysical solace (which, I wish to say at once, all true tragedy sends us away) that, despite every phenomenal change, life is at bottom indestructibly joyful and powerful, was expressed most concretely in the chorus of satyrs, nature beings who dwell behind all civilization and preserve their identity through every change of generations and historical movement.

With this chorus the profound Greek, so uniquely susceptible to the subtlest and deepest suffering, who had penetrated the destructive agencies of both nature and history, solaced himself. Though he had been in danger of craving a Buddhistic denial of the will ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Receive the god into your kingdom
pour libations, cover your head with ivy, join the dance! ~ Euripides

Of all creatures that can feel and think,
we women are the worst treated things alive ~ Euripides

Greek tragedy was pre-Freudian, so every emotion has to be so raw; there are no psychological undertones. ~ Lydia Leonard

No mortal ever knows happiness and good fortune all the way to the end. Each one is born with his bitterness waiting for him. ~ Euripides

Well,the hell with you." She natched up her purse. "The hell with both of you."
"We love you, Margo."
That stopped her.She whirled back to glare at Kate. "That's a lousy thing to say.Bitch." When Kate grinned,she tried to grin back.Instead she dropped her purse back behind the counter and burst into tears.
"Oh,shit." Shocked,Kate leaped forward to gather her close. "Oh,hell.Oh, shit.Lock the door,Laura.I'm sorry, Margo.I'm sorry.Bad plan.I thought you'd just get mad and go tearing off to fix his butt.What did the bastard do to you,honey?I'll fix his butt for you."
"He dumped me." Thoroughly ashamed, she sobbed wretchedly on Kate's shoulder. "He hates me.I wish he were dead.I wish I had slept with Claudio."
"Wait.Whoa." Firmly, Kate drew he back,while Laura brought over a cup of tea.
"Who's Claudio and when didn't you sleep with him?"
"He's a friend,just a friend.And I never slept with him." The tears were so hot it felt as though her eyes were on fire. "Especially not when Josh found us in the bedroom."
"Uh-oh."
Kate rolled her eyes at Laura. "Is it a French farce or a Greek tragedy?You be the judge."
"Shut up,Kate.Come on Margo.Let's sit down.This time you tell us everything. ~ Nora Roberts

My sister's looking off to the side so half her face is in shadow and her smile is neatly cut in half. It's like one of those Greek tragedy masks in a textbook that's half one idea and half the opposite. Light and dark. Hope and despair. Laughter and sadness. Trust and loneliness. ~ Haruki Murakami

In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb. ~ Dennis Lehane

If only the herdsman had not brought him up with the flocks, not reared him, Paris, Alexander, to watch his flock by the clear springs where the nymphs rise, and the rich pastures starred with roses and hyacinths for the goddesses to gather. ~ Euripides

No one will ever make necessity not happen. ~ Anne Carson

Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the news, the stock-exchange reports, and the weather forecast are about the only things spared. ~ Jean Baudrillard

Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events. ~ John Berger

I gave them hope, and so turned away their eyes from death ~ Aeschylus

My mom used to say that Greek Easter was later because then you get stuff cheaper. ~ Amy Sedaris

The extermination of the buffalo has been a veritable tragedy of the animal world. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

What makes America great is that we can come together during times of national tragedy. ~ Dennis Hastert

If my luck held, it wouldn't be a handsome Greek demigod looking for the love of his life or at least his love of a couple of hours. ~ Ilona Andrews

I like stories"
He propped himself up on his elbow, looking down at her. "What sort of stories?"
"Stories with magic and intrigue. Tragedy. And Love."
"Ah yes...love. You can't have a story without love."
Joanna giggled and nodded, relaxing. "Well, you can have a boring story without love ~ Delilah Dove

If I had the pen of Moliere, I could make him comic. That is the role of art, is it not? To make monsters comic, so we can bear them, and our own cheap griefs into grand tragedy, so that others will weep with us. ~ Judith Merkle Riley

Your ancestors came to Macedonia and the rest of Hellas [Greece] and did us great harm, though we had done them no prior injury. I have been appointed leader of the Greeks, and wanting to punish the Persians I have come to Asia, which I took from you. ~ Alexander The Great

For a while, every smart and shy eccentric from Bobby Fischer to Bill Gate was hastily fitted with this label, and many were more or less believably retrofitted, including Isaac Newton, Edgar Allen Pie, Michelangelo, and Virginia Woolf. Newton had great trouble forming friendships and probably remained celibate. In Poe's poem Alone, he wrote that "All I lov'd - I lov'd alone." Michelangelo is said to have written "I have no friends of any sort and I don't want any." Woolf killed herself.
Asperger's disorder, once considered a sub-type of autism, was named after the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger, a pioneer, in the 1940s, in identifying and describing autism. Unlike other early researchers, according to the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, Asperger felt that autistic people could have beneficial talents, especially what he called a "particular originality of thought" that was often beautiful and pure, unfiltered by culture of discretion, unafraid to grasp at extremely unconventional ideas. Nearly every autistic person that Sacks observed appeard happiest when alone. The word "autism" is derived from autos, the Greek word for "self."
"The cure for Asperger's syndrome is very simple," wrote Tony Attwood, a psychologist and Asperger's expert who lives in Australia. The solution is to leave the person alone. "You cannot have a social deficit when you are alone. You cannot have a communication problem when you are alone. All the diagnostic criteria dissolve in so ~ Michael Finkel

The stories teach them valuable life lessons. That good things happen to bad people. That it's possible to make a bad situation even worse if you don't think it through. That parents are clueless except when they're not. That it's good to try new things even when a new thing is kind of disgusting, because new experiences make you a well-rounded person. That art can be transcendent. That lust is all-powerful, that drugs are fun, and that not everyone who does them is a loser. That losing people is part of life. That where comedy goes, tragedy isn't far behind. That everyone has issues with their bodies, but some take it too far, almost to death. That fear can be exhilarating. That boys are assholes. That it's important to look forward and never look back ... ~ Megan McCafferty

Every triumph has to overcome the fear of tragedy. ~ Debasish Mridha

Margarita was never short of money. She could buy whatever she liked. Her husband had plenty of interesting friends. Margarita never had to cook. Margarita knew nothing of the horrors of living in a shared flat. In short ... was she happy? Not for a moment. ~ Mikhail Bulgakov

He was not like Greek fathers. He didn't tell us to get married. My father thought it was very important that we travel, learn languages, be educated. ~ Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki

Grace Slaughter - the surname of her fifth husband, a manufacturer of pharmaceutical toners and "prophylactic" products, recently deceased due to a ruptured peritoneum - was sharply chauvinistic and would allow no more than two exceptions to her all-American views, exceptions with which her first spouse, Astolphe de Guéménolé-Longtgermain, no doubt had something to do: cooking had to be done by French nationals of male gender, laundry and ironing by British subjects of female gender (and absolutely not by Chinese). That allowed Henri Fresnel to be hired without having to hide his original citizenship, which is what had to be done by the director (Hungarian), the set designer (Russian), the choreographer (Lithuanian), the dancers (Italian, Greek, Egyptian), the scriptwriter (English), the librettist (Austrian), and the composer, a Finn of Bulgarian descent with a large dash of Romanian. ~ Georges Perec

See? Memories aren't happy, they're sad. Don't you know anything? ~ Morris Gleitzman

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. ~ Brian D. McLaren

I'm not sure what I'm in right now – a fantasy or tragedy. Perhaps it's both. Maybe it's always been both. Maybe that's what life is – a beautiful mess. ~ Ginger Scott

In Stalin's famous words, one death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic. In this case, it is not even a particularly good statistic. The very incomprehensibility of what a million horrible and violent deaths might mean, and the impossibility of producing an appropriate response, is perhaps the reason that the events following partition have yielded such a great and moving body of fictional literature and such an inadequate and flimsy factual history. What does it matter to the readers of history today whether there were 200,000 deaths, or 1 million, or 2 million? On that scale, is it possible to feel proportional revulsion, to be five times more upset at 1 million deaths than at 200,000? Few can grasp the awfulness of how it might feel to have their fathers barricaded in their houses and burnt alive, their mothers beaten and thrown off speeding trains, their daughters torn away, raped and branded, their sons held down in full view, screaming and pleading, while a mob armed with rough knives hacked off their hands and feet. All these things happened, and many more like them; not just once, but perhaps a million times. It is not possible to feel sufficient emotion to appreciate this monstrous savagery and suffering. That is the true horror of the events in the Punjab in 1947: one of the vilest episodes in the whole of history, a devastating illustration of the worst excesses to which human beings can succumb. The death toll is just a number. ~ Alex Von Tunzelmann

We're not going to waste our valuable space or your precious energy by giving equal time to stories of tragedy, failure, and tumult. They get far more that their fair share of attention everywhere else. Future historians might even conclude that our age suffered from a collective obsessive-compulsive disorder: the pathological need to repetitively seek out reasons for how bad life is. ~ Rob Brezsny

Read Ben Graham and Phil Fisher read annual reports, but don't do equations with Greek letters in them. ~ Warren Buffett

And when a futurist dies, the tragedy is that we lose access to all the possible futures they imagined for us. Our only connection, afterward, is through the arcane procedure like literary interpretation, like reading the flight of birds or throwing the I Ching, as Ballard must have as a child in Shanghai. Like it or not, we live in one of Ballard's futures; a little apocalyptic, bent by technology. ~ William Ball

A tragedy means always a mans struggle with that which is stronger than man. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost ideas with Hebraism is conduct and obedience.Nothing can do away with this ineffaceable difference. The Greek quarrel with the body and its desires is, that they hinder right thinking; the Hebrew quarrel with them is, that they hinder right acting. ~ Matthew Arnold

All free peoples are deeply impressed by the courage and steadfastness of the Greek nation. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

I wouldn't say "art" as much as "virtue," in the ancient Greek sense of "andreia" – manly action – or "arete," excellence. In my experience, Resistance kicks in any time we try to move ourselves from a lower plane to a higher. In other words, when we try to align with the better parts of our nature. This move can be creative (art) or physical (athletics) or it can be ethical, moral or spiritual. Have you ever tried to meditate? I have and it kicks my butt every time. Spiritual stuff is hard! But so is making "cold calls" if you're opening a new business. Somehow the principle is the same. We're trying to overcome our natural laziness, selfishness, sloppiness, etc. So I wouldn't say "art," I'd say "virtue. ~ Steven Pressfield

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Mother after the Greek kids' parties because they served Italian rum cake. Covered in slivered almonds and soaked in booze, Italian rum cake is everything kids hate about everything. No one even ate it. ~ Tina Fey

The greatest Tragedy of life is not death but what dies within us when we are still alive ~ Norman

I saw the destruction of Dresden. I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, that's the soul seeking some relief. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

She will be busy writing novels. As soon as she had has gotten far enough away from this frighteningly puritanical country, her mind will be set free, and she will be able to turn all of her observations in richly drawn characters and intricately themed stories."
"But what will she eat, dear Grass?" Barnard leaned against the wall, his arms crossing his chest skeptically.
"Baguette and red wine, pure art, filthy air. Look at her, she is made of rose petals, and the world will take good care of her. And if it does not, we will have our hearts moved by such an exquisitely gorgeous tragedy. ~ Anna Godbersen

In the eyes of Hayek and his contemporaries, the European tragedy had thus been brought about by the shortcomings of the Left: first through its inability to achieve its objectives and then thanks to its failure to withstand the challenge from the Right. Each of them, albeit in different ways, arrived at the same conclusion: the best - indeed the only - way to defend liberalism and an open society was to keep the state out of economic life. ~ Tony Judt

We get mad at someone for cutting us off in traffic or for taking too long to order at Starbucks or for not responding exactly as we see fit, and we have no idea that behind their facade, they may be dealing with some industrial-strength shit. Their lives may be in pieces. They may be in the midst of incalculable tragedy and turmoil, and they may be hanging on to their sanity by a thread. But we don't care. We don't see. We just keep pushing. ~ Harlan Coben

For many potential Bible readers, this expectation that the Bible is univocal is paralyzing. You notice what seem to be contradictions or tensions between different voices in the text. You can't find an obvious way to reconcile them. You figure that it must be your problem. You don't know how to read it correctly, or you're missing something. You're not holy enough to read the Holy Bible. It might even be sacrilege for you to try. If the Bible is God's perfect infallible Word, then any misunderstanding or ambiguity must be the result of our own depravity. That is, our sinful nature as fallen creatures is what separates us from God, and therefore from God's Word. So you either give up or let someone holier than thou tell you "what it really says." I think that's tragic. You're letting someone else impoverish it for you, when in fact you have just brushed up against the rich polyvocality of biblical literature. ~ Timothy Beal

And she cries even more, for the way the universe keeps throwing her together with the players in her son's tragedy, like handfuls of dust. ~ Clara Chow

The Order of the Titans had agreed with his assessment. This generation, the Order would be successful where previous generations had failed, because this time they would steal mankind's inspiration. They would kill the muses for the greater good ...
For the good of mankind. ~ Lisa Kessler

Part of why I love Greek food so much is that it is simple, but it's unpretentious. It's authentic. ~ Princess Tatiana Of Greece And Denmark

The superiority of the Greeks seems not so much the result of climate and society, as of the simplicity of their end and the uniformity of their means. ~ Henry Fuseli

A moment is never long enough to account for tragedy when you are in it. ~ Kevin Powers

Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation. ~ Whittaker Chambers