The tragedy of a man is greater when he gives it up.

The tragedy in a man’s life is what dies inside of him while he lives.

La tragedia del hombre es mayor cuando se la deja caer.

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

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

The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.

Calamity is man's true touchstone.

That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy.

I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing — his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his "rightful" position in his society. Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.

On the contrary, as Miller also notes, “Tragedy implies more optimism in its author than does comedy, and . . . its final result ought to be the reinforcement of the onlooker’s brightest opinions of the human animal.” For the tragic view indicates that we take seriously man’s freedom and his need to realize himself; it demonstrates our belief in the “indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity.

To write tragedy, a man must feel tragedy. To feel tragedy, a man must be aware of the world in which he lives. Not only with his mind, but with his blood and sinews.

The tragedy of a man who has found himself out.

The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast and largely hostile environment, in which we can achieve great things only by defying the gods; and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment.

Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up. That he has to leave the nest, the security, and go out to do battle. He has to lose everything that is lovely and fight for a new loveliness of his own making, and it's a tragedy. A lot of people don't have the courage to do it.