I've come to realize that life is not a musical comedy, it's a Greek tragedy. — Billy Joel
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
Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing. — Frida Kahlo
It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise. — Henry A Kissinger
In tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is a moment. — Christopher Fry
Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism. — Susan Sontag
The greatest tragedies were written by the Greeks and Shakespeare...neither knew chocolate. — Sandra Boynton
The essence of drama is that man cannot walk away from the consequences of his own deeds. — Harold Hayes
The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy. — Dawn Powell
Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot. — Buster Keaton
Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life. — Antonin Artaud
Genuine tragedy is a case not of right against wrong but of right against right - two equally justified ethical principles embodied in people of unchangeable will. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live. — Robert Kennedy
In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed. — Wislawa Szymborska
One of the greatest things drama can do, at it's best, is to redefine the words we use every day such as love, home, family, loyalty and envy. Tragedy need not be a downer. — Ben Kingsley
Short Greek Tragedy Quotes
History is a tragedy, not a morality tale. — I. F. Stone
Our own death wish is our only real tragedy. — Mario Puzo
The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach — Benjamin E. Mays
History repeats, first as tragedy and then as farce. — Robert W. Malone
Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. — Oscar Wilde
The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives. — Albert Schweitzer
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. — Karl Marx
Life is a tragedy of nutrition — Arnold Ehret
The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love. — W. Somerset Maugham
Greek Tragedy Image Quotes
Wear your tragedies as armor, not shackles.
Greek Drama Quotes
Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done. — Edward Bond
I don't buy into any of that hogwash. They put that out to sell tickets. It's just a classic horror movie, with the Greek drama formula of good versus evil, and lots of fear. — Margot Kidder
Movies are immortal art - the first new art since Greek drama. — Eric Johnston
Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.
We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air: the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner. — Eleanora Duse
Baseball is an art! A drama! A ballet without music! Let us give it a Greek chorus! — Deborah Wiles
Well, opera began with an intent to resuscitate Greek drama, that is, modern opera as we know it. — John Eaton
Hard work without talent is a shame, but talent without hard work is a tragedy.
If you look at the timing of many of the Greek dramas from the theatrical point of view, it's all off, and I think the reason for that is that music played a very important part. — John Eaton
Plays are just all sort of playful asides, and there's a great deal of reference here to Greek mythology, plays, and dramas. The idea of the chorus is really important in Greek drama and I loved the idea of including that. — Lauren Groff
We need new art. Old art cannot do that. It can do lots of other things, and of course humanity hasn't changed that much in the last thousand or two thousand years.So that the old Greek dramas are still at the very heart, core, of human experience, but still we need new stuff. — Esa-Pekka Salonen
I think great humor lies in playing the truth of a situation. I see myself as a performer and that applies to a Greek drama or a modern comedy. — Brendan Coyle
The greatest tragedy in life is to spend your whole life fishing only to discover it was never fish that you were after. — Henry David Thoreau
We all have inner demons to fight, we call these demons, fear and hatred and anger. If you do not conquer them then a life of one hundred years is a tragedy. If you do, then a life of a single day can be a triumph. — Yip Man
It is a tragedy when the church saves money instead of saving souls. We MUST spend to save. — Reinhard Bonnke
This is my genre...the happiness, tragedies, and the sorrows of mankind as realized in the teeming black ghetto. — Jacob Lawrence
Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.
The tragedy of life is not found in failure but complacency. Not in you doing too much, but doing too little. Not in you living above your means, but below your capacity. It's not failure but aiming too low, that is life's greatest tragedy. — Benjamin E. Mays
It is a tragedy that we live in a world where physical courage is so common, and moral courage is so rare. — Claude Monet
We are citizens of the world. The tragedy of our times is that we do not know this. — Woodrow Wilson
Being a hero doesn’t mean you’re invincible. It just means that you’re brave enough to stand up and do what’s needed. — Rick Riordan
According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves. — Plato
I'm obsessed with Greek mythology. My favorite goddess is Artemis. She's strong and reminds me of Katniss, the heroine of The Hunger Games. — Isabelle Fuhrman
Superheroes fill a gap in the pop culture psyche, similar to the role of Greek mythology. There isn't really anything else that does the job in modern terms. For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously. — Christopher Nolan
II know a little about Greek mythology. It's not that far away from the Nordic mythology. — Sayings
In our household, the Bible, the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology — Barack Obama
Something has got to hold it together. I'm saying my prayers to Elmer, the Greek god of glue. — Tom Robbins
Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks. — Alistair Cooke
..,No love cannot leave where there is no trust..,~cupid and psyche..,"Greek mythology of Edith Hamilton — Edith Hamilton
In Greek mythology, Antaeus was a giant who was strong as long as he had contact with the earth. When he was lifted from the earth he lost strength. So it is with engineers. They must not become isolated from the real world... — Hyman Rickover
Greek Myth Quotes
As the ancient Greeks replaced myth-based explanations with mechanistic models of the Solar System, their emphasis shifted from asking why to asking how. — Max Tegmark
Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings. — E. O. Wilson
...it seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I wnt about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them. I read a Greek or Negro myth as if a lunatic were telling me his anamnesis. — Carl Jung
Children are much more understanding of the suddenness and arbitrariness of death than we are. The old fairy tales contain a lot of that, and we've stolen from them, just as they stole from Greek myth, which has that same mixture of pre-Christian chaos. — Emma Thompson
Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. — Vladimir Nabokov
NFL Films has had one continuous, creative vision for 47 years. These are timeless things; timeless stories that we capture just like people go back and read Greek mythology. — Steve Sabol
I've long said that comic books are the modern equivalent of our Greek myths. — David S. Goyer
The muse of music isn't just from Greek mythology, but living in people like the Beatles, Chuck Berry, Anita Baker, Aretha Franklin. — Ernie Isley
When I was a kid, I took 'The Brady Bunch' and 'The Partridge Family' very seriously. It was a world to me in the same way that the Greek myths would have been had I read them. You know, Marcia is Athena and Mr. Brady is Zeus. — George Saunders
All the superhero stuff is Greek myths and Greek gods, wearing tights and capes. That's what they are. That's what I gravitate towards. — Louis Leterrier
Greek Culture Quotes
In business you need two Jews for one Greek, two Greeks for one Syrian and two Syrians for one Armenian — Greek Proverbs
American culture is kind of a universal culture, I guess. It's things Greeks grew up with, common references you can use. It's very interesting. — Yorgos Lanthimos
Kant does represents a distinctively modern view of the human condition in contrast to that of ancient high culture, found in ancient Greek ethics and also in ancient Chinese ethics. — Allen W. Wood
The Greeks, with their truly healthy culture, have once and for all justified philosophy simply by having engaged in it, and having engaged in it more fully than any other people. — Friedrich Nietzsche
Greek culture is pleasant to contemplate because of its great simplicity and naturalness, and because of the absence of gadgets, each of which is sooner or later a cause of servitude. — George Sarton
I had the good luck a few years ago to visit the archeological site of Zippori in Israel ... I could see here displayed the Greek culture that Jesus decisively rejected, the same Greek culture that infiltrated the Christian religion soon after his death and has dominated Christianity ever since. — Freeman Dyson
Genetically, I'm pure Greek. Psychologically, environmentally, culturally, by choice, I'm a member of the black community. — Johnny Otis
Just as the ideal of classic Greek culture was the most perfect harmony of mind and body, so a human and a bicycle are the perfect synthesis of body and machine. — Richard Ballantine
Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand. — Allan Bloom
Ancient Greek Quotes
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others. — Pericles
I have a high art, I hurt with cruelty those who would damage me. — Archilochus
Sex and sleep alone make me conscious that I am mortal. — Alexander The Great
Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners. — Vladimir Lenin
The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence. — John F. Kennedy
We look at the ancient Greeks with their gods on a mountain top throwing lightning bolts and say, 'Those ancient Greeks. They were so silly. So primitive and naive. Not like our religions. We have burning bushes talking to people and guys walking on water. We're ...sophisticated.' — Paul Provenza
Chaos does not mean total disorder. Chaos means a multiplicity of possibilities. Chaos is from the ancient Greek words that means a thing that is birthed from the void. And it was about that which is possible, not about disorder. — Jok Church
He is the richest who is content with the least. — Socrates
Few men have the natural strength to honor a friend's success without envy. — Aeschylus
Ancient Greece Quotes
Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie. — Steven Pressfield
The spirit of Greece, passing through and ascending above the world, hath so animated universal nature, that the very rocks and woods, the very torrents and wilds burst forth with it. — Walter Savage Landor
The road to the Olympics, leads to no city, no country. It goes far beyond New York or Moscow, ancient Greece or Nazi Germany. The road to the Olympics leads — in the end — to the best within us. — Jesse Owens
Nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentlemen. — George Bernard Shaw
In many ways we are all sons and daughters of ancient Greece. — Nia Vardalos
We are living in the era of the busybody. In ancient Greece, if a person wanted guidance, it involved a long, arduous expensive journey to consult the oracle at Delphi. Today, if you want guidance, all you have to do is unplug your ears. — Margo Kaufman
And so, inevitably, one returns to the centre of Western culture, Greece, and we have never, in any sense, lost our ties with the architectural concepts that this country's ancient civilization explored and demonstrated, nor with the political and social freedom that lay behind them. — Stephen Gardiner
Ancient of days! august Athena! where, Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul? Gone--glimmering through the dream of things that were; First in the race that led to glory's goal, They won, and pass'd away--Is this the whole? — Lord Byron
I judge wisely...as if nothin ever surprise me,
Loungin, between two pillars of ivory.
I'm lively, my dome piece is like buildin stones in Greece.
My poems are deep, from ancient thrones I speak. — Killah Priest
Nothing exists; even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can't be communicated to others. — Gorgias
You must understand what the Parthenon Marbles mean to us. They are our pride. They are our sacrifices. They are our noblest symbol of excellence. They are a tribute to the democratic philosophy. They are our aspirations and our name. They are the essence of Greekness. — Melina Mercouri
White folks was in the caves while we [blacks] was building empires ... We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was ... we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it. — Al Sharpton
When you want wisdom and insight as badly as you want to breathe, it is then you shall have it. — Socrates
Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few. — Pythagoras
Greek philosophy departs from the assumption that we can understand the world autonomously using our rational faculties. Islam is not saying this. — Tariq Ramadan
The gift of truth excels all other gifts. — Buddha
...for the object of education is to teach us to love beauty. — Plato
Those whose hearts are fixed on Reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers. — 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
Greek Art Quotes
Your looks are laughable, unphotographable, yet you're my favorite work of art. Is your figure less than Greek, is your mouth a little weak? When you open it to speak, are you smart? — Chet Baker
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
The future science of government should be called 'la cybernétique' (1843) Coining the French word to mean 'the art of governing,' from the Greek (Kybernetes = navigator or steersman), subsequently adopted as cybernetics by Norbert Weiner for the field of control and communication theory. — Andre-Marie Ampere
Botany is the art of insulting flowers in Greek and Latin. — Alphonse Karr
The Dance of the Future will have to become again a high religious art as it was with the Greeks. For art which is not religious is not art, it is mere merchandise — Isadora Duncan
The oldest theory of art belongs to the Greeks, who regarded art as an imitation (mimesis) of reality. The strength of that theory is that it explains the way in which art takes its materials from real life. — Leland Ryken
Prehistoric art came to move me much more than Greek art. Greek art has beautiful women and handsome men, but I don't care. — Pierre Soulages
I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living. — Raymond Chandler
All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent. — John Ruskin
I would like my work to be recognized as being in the classical tradition (Coptic, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese), as representing the Ideal in the mind. Classical art cannot possibly be eclectic. One must see the ideal in one's own mind. It is like a memory - an awareness -of perfection. — Agnes Martin
The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. — Plato
Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. In other countries, the business of laughing is left to the viewers. Here, their laughter is put on the screen, integrated into the show. It is the screen that is laughing and having a good time. You are simply left alone with your consternation. — Jean Baudrillard
If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama. — Lillian Hellman
People try to make a Greek tragedy of my life, and they can't do it. I'm too happy. — Curt Flood
Frequently my life has been likened to a Greek tragedy, and the actress in me cannot deny that comparison. — Patricia Neal
In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb. — Dennis Lehane
My first job was a Greek tragedy, and ever since, one job just seemed to roll onto the next. I've been terribly lucky. — Hayley Atwell
I often teach a graduate theater seminar on Greek tragedy in performance. I usually begin by saying that no matter what technological advances occur, the wisdom of these plays will never be obsolete. — Neil Patrick Harris
The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty. — E. M. Forster
As 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
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
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
The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies. — Edward Bond
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
Conflict is the basis of drama. I guess that goes back as long as time has existed as far as mankind is concerned, dating back to the Greek tragedies or the Old Testament. And violence is a form of conflict, so whether that's catharsis or whether that has some socially damaging effect on audiences - I suppose that would just depend. — Clint Eastwood
I perform regularly with a theater company called Outside the Wire who take performances of Greek tragedy to American-military audiences around the world to create discussion about PTSD and soldier suicide. It's one of the greatest things I've ever been asked to do as an actor. — Bryce Pinkham
The Greek tragedies and comedies are like a roadmap to all the ways in which trying to live this rich, full life can go wrong. You could get into a war. You could find that you have members of your family on the wrong side of a political crisis. You could be raped. You could find that your child has gone crazy because of some horrible experience she's had. — Martha C. Nussbaum
I think that the real tragedy of Greece - aside of the savagery of European bureaucracy, Brussels bureaucracy and northern banks, which was really savage - is that the Greek crisis didn't have to erupt. It could have been taken care of pretty easily at the very beginning. But it happened and Syriza came into office with a declared commitment to combat it, and in fact as I recall they actually called a referendum, which horrified Europe. — Noam Chomsky
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
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
I'm intrigued by the classic Greek tragedies, as well as by the idea of the Greek chorus. — Joseph Boyden
The 'I' character in journalism is almost pure invention. — Janet Malcolm
I always think a good sports movie is emblematic in the same way that a great Greek tragedy really has a certain kind of structure, or a Shakespearean play if you're looking at a comedy or a tragedy, is that these are the heights and depths of human emotion. — Carla Gugino
I'm drawn to a lot of tragedies, and I love a Greek tragedy.But I would think - I start thinking realistically about it, and performing eight days a week, that would take a toll. I take things to heart. I don't know if I could survive, like, "Medea." — Eva Mendes
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
What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason — instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods. — David Simon
I don't write fantasy, I write reality. Also, my novels have roots to Greek tragedies and as such, there has to be tragedy. — Nicholas Sparks
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
Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last. — Marisha Pessl
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