Modern Tragedy Quotes & Sayings

God the father, and even more often the devil himself, appears at times in the place of fate in the modern tragedy. Why is it thatthis has not induced any scholar to develop a theory of the diabolical genre? — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

It has long been a source of wonder to me why the leading criminological writers
men like Edmund Lester Pearson, H. B. Irving, Filson Young, Canon Brookes, William Bolitho, and Harold Eaton
have not devoted more space to the Greene tragedy; for here, surely, is one of the outstanding murder mysteries of modern times
a case practically unique in the annals of latter-day crime. — S. S. Van Dine

I wouldn't overall say that The Diagnosis it's a funny book. I would say that it has comic moments. It's a modern tragedy. — Alan Lightman

Here's the tragedy of the modern record business: It's radio. If you're not on radio, nobody really is going to hear you or see you or care about you. — Shirley Manson

Few poets better convey the uneasy transition from Victorianism to Modernism than Thomas Hardy. His novels, written between 1870 and 1895, made him not only the recorder of his distinctive region of 'Wessex', but the explorer of the transition of lives and minds from the age of traditional values and religious certainties to the age of godlessness and modern tragedy, a transition sometimes described as 'the clash of the modern'. — Ronald Carter

No greater tragedy exists in modern civilization than the aged, worn-out worker who after a life of ceaseless effort and useful productivity must look forward for his declining years to a poorhouse. A modern social consciousness demands a more humane and efficient arrangement. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

Disgusted by the abuses to which it led, humanity repressed Christianity by which it had so long been dominated. Repressed, but not eliminated. Herein lies, I believe, the essence of the tragedy of modern times. The modern man lives as if Christianity were a negligible hypothesis with no relation to the concrete realities of the world and society. And yet at the bottom of his heart this man remains impregnated with Christianity, so that he lives in a state of perpetual ambivalence with regard to it. — Paul Tournier

It is a modern tragedy that despair has so many spokesmen, and hope so few. — Oscar Hammerstein II

He was thinking of Marco, Daisy, Sono
Oguki, Madeleine, the Pontritters, and now and then of the difference between ancient and modern
tragedy according to Hegel, the inner experience of the heart and the deepening of individual
character in the modern age. His own individual character cut off at times both from facts and from
values. But modern character is inconstant, divided, vacillating, lacking the stone-like certitude of
archaic man, also deprived of the firm ideas of the seventeenth century, clear, hard theorems. — Saul Bellow

In modern times, the sisters have largely disappeared from the collective consciousness, but the idea of Fate hasn't. Why do we still believe? Does it make tragedy more bearable to believe that we ourselves had no hand in it, that we couldn't have prevented it? It was always ever thus.

Things happen for a reason, says Natasha's mother. What she means is Fate has a Reason and, though you may not know it, there's a certain comfort in knowing that there's a Plan.

Natasha is different. She believes in determinism- cause and effect. One action leads to another leads to another. Your actions determine your fate. In this way she's not unlike Daniel's dad.

Daniel lives in the nebulous space in between. Maybe he wasn't meant to meet Natasha today. Maybe it was random chance after all.

But.

Once they met, the rest of it, the love between them, was inevitable. — Nicola Yoon

Norman Cousins, endeavoring in his essay Modern Man Is Obsolete to express the deepest feelings of intelligent people at that staggering historical moment, wrote not about how to protect one's self from atomic radiation, or how to meet political problems, or the tragedy of man's self-destruction. Instead his editorial was a meditation on loneliness. "All man's history," he proclaimed, "is an endeavor to shatter his loneliness. — Rollo May

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

We three belong to the Middle Ages. We have this need of heroism, and there is no place for such feelings in modern life. That is our tragedy. Once I wanted to be a saint. It seemed the only absolute act left to do, for what is most powerful in me is the craving for purity, greatness. — Anais Nin

It is a tragedy of modern life that the light of truth scares the society much more than the darkness of ignorance. — Abhijit Naskar

This exile is a fascinating symbolic act from our modern psychoanalytic viewpoint, for we have held in earlier chapters that the greatest threat and greatest cause of anxiety for an American near the end of the twentieth century is not castration but ostracism, the terrible fate of being exiled by one's group. Many a contemporary man castrates himself or permits himself to be castrated because of fear of being exiled if he doesn't. He renounces his power and conforms under the great threat and peril of ostracism.
- Rollo May, "The Tragedy of Truth About Oneself" (The Psycology of Existence: An Integrative, Clinical Perspective by Kirk Schneider and Rollo May), pp. 14-15 — Rollo May

It is a modern tragedy that one of the Soviet Union's most intelligent and realistic leaders has served and died during the administration of the most ill-informed and dangerous man ever to occupy the White House. — George McGovern

Since 1870 a commander has seldom if ever been able to survey a whole battlefield from a single spot; and in any case he has had little opportunity - although sometimes a considerable inclination - to try. For the modern commander is much more akin to the managing director of a large conglomerate enterprise than ever he is to the warrior chief of old. He has become the head of a complex military organization, whose many branches he must oversee and on whose cooperation, assistance, and support he depends for his success. As the size and complexity of military forces have increased, the business of war has developed an organizational dimension that can make a mighty contribution to triumph - or to tragedy. Hitherto, the role of this organizational dimension of war in explaining military performance has been strangely neglected. We shall return to it later - indeed, it will form one of the major themes of this book. For now we simply need to note its looming presence. — Eliot A. Cohen

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art. — Salvador Dali

The weakness of modern tragedy[is that] transgression against the social code is made to bring destruction, as though the social code worked our irrevocable fate. — D.H. Lawrence

The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals. — Edward Abbey

Classical tragedy was the war between good and evil. We wanted evil to be defeated and good to be victorious. But the battle in modern tragedy is between good and good. And no matter which side wins, we'll still be heartbroken. — Asghar Farhadi

Let us recognize that a large fraction of our suffering and that of our fellow human beings is brought about by what we do to one another. It is humankind, not God, that had invented knives, arrows, guns, bombs, and all manner of other instruments of torture used through the ages. The tragedy of the young child killed by a drunk driver, of the innocent young man dying on the battlefield, or of the young girl cut down by a stray bullet in a crime-ridden section of a modern city can hardly be blamed on God. After all, we have somehow been given free will, the ability to do as we please. We use this ability frequently to disobey the Moral Law. And when we do so, we shouldn't then blame God for the consequences. — Francis S. Collins

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. — Albert Schweitzer

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

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. — Abraham Lincoln

The locus of the modern struggle with its enemy of death is clearly the body (not mind, society, or the afterworld). The body is the site of tragedy, the ultimate unresolvable paradox, for it is at once the source of life and of death. — Margaret M. Lock

Every reiteration of the idea that _nothing matters_ debases the human spirit.
Every reiteration of the idea that there is no drama in modern life, there is only dramatization, that there is no tragedy, there is only unexplained misfortune, debases us. It denies what we know to be true. In denying what we know, we are as a nation which cannot remember its dreams
like an unhappy person who cannot remember his dreams and so denies that he does dream, and denies that there are such things as dreams. — David Mamet

Modern culture appears to have adopted a strategy of tragedy. If we come here and say, I didn't intend to cause global warning, it's not part of my plan, then we realize it's part of our defacto plan because it's the thing that's happening because we have no other plan. — William McDonough

If Shakespeare thought comedy worthwhile, that means the rest of us can take a break from tragedy now and then without betraying our calling, even if the modern professional intellectual, a poseur by nature, has yet to discover this. — Mark Helprin

In the context of stress, the great paradox of the modern age may be that there is not more hardship, just more news - and too much of it. The 24/7 streaming torrent of tragedy and demands flashing at us from an array of digital displays keeps the amygdala flying. — John J. Ratey

The beauty and the tragedy of the modern world is that it eliminates many situations that require people to demonstrate a commitment to the collective good. — Sebastian Junger

The tragedy of modern democracies is that they have not yet succeeded in effecting democracy. — Jacques Maritain

The repression of virtuous instinct in the modern world is an incremental tragedy. Repress one instinct, and you repress many; other parts of consciousness go down, also. — Michael Leunig

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

I saw it all suddenly while I was reading Howards End . . . Forster's the only one who understands what the modern novel ought to be . . . Our frightful mistake was that we believed in tragedy: the point is, tragedy's quite impossible nowadays . . . We ought to aim at being essentially comic writers . . . The whole of Forster's technique is based on the tea-table: instead of trying to screw all his scenes up to the highest possible pitch, he tones them down until they sound like mothers'-meeting gossip . . . In fact, there's actually less emphasis laid on the big scenes than on the unimportant ones: that's what's so utterly terrific. It's the completely new kind of accentuation - like a person talking a different language . . . . — Christopher Isherwood

We were stumbling sluts married to mud. When the war was over, nobody bothered to tell us. Our tragedy was permanent. No records were kept of us anywhere. We shuffled through ruined villages aimlessly. Anyone who had a menial, pointless job to do had only to wave us down and we would do it ... On and on Helga spun her yarn, weaving a biography on the crazy loom of modern history. — Kurt Vonnegut

David Brinkley was an icon of modern broadcast journalism, a brilliant writer who could say in a few words what the country needed to hear during times of crisis, tragedy and triumph. — Tom Brokaw