Top 1200 Tragic Flaw Quotes & Sayings

Explore popular Tragic Flaw quotes.
Last updated on April 14, 2025.
With my being from Hawaii and being very family oriented I don't really have a fear of a tragic ending. I dont see any tragic ending for me.
Akri won't let me eat any of them nasty gods. What's the world coming to when a demon gots to beg for tidbits...not eve a finger sandwich or a single knuckle. Tragic. Terribly tragic.
There is a flaw in the operation of representative government. The flaw produces the growth of government. — © Allan H. Meltzer
There is a flaw in the operation of representative government. The flaw produces the growth of government.
When something tragic has happened, you can try to move on and put something tragic behind you, but it rarely works. It's in you when something like that happens. It's physically a part of your life.
"And they lived happily ever after" is one of the most tragic sentences in literature. It's tragic because it's falsehood. It is a myth that has led generations to expect something from marriage that is not possible.
The Duchess set about studying Annette and shortly found her adversary's tragic flaw. Chocolate.
What give all that is tragic, whatever its form, the characteristic of the sublime, is the first inkling of the knowledge that the world and life can give no satisfaction, and are not worth our investment in them. The tragic spirit consists in this. Accordingly it leads to resignation.
Whereas the comic confronts simply logical contradictions, the tragic confronts a moral predicament. Not minor matters of true andfalse but crucial questions of right and wrong, good and evil face the tragic character in a tragic situation.
At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can't fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I'm reading, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I think I'm in literature,' but my life was never like that.
The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.
If you follow nature you will not be able to vanquish the tragic in any real degree in your art... We must free ourselves from our attachment to the external, for only then do we transcend the tragic, and are enabled consciously to contemplate the repose which is within all things.
The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
The passing of an ordinary man is sad. The passing of a great man is tragic, and doubly tragic when the greatness passes before the man does.
Detachment is a flaw, not a virtue-don’t you realize that? — © Steven Erikson
Detachment is a flaw, not a virtue-don’t you realize that?
I know that you're selfish, selfish beyond words, and I know that you haven't the nerve of a rabbit, I know you're a liar and a humbug, I know that you're utterly contemptible. And the tragic part is'--her face was on a sudden distraught with pain--'the tragic part is that notwithstanding I love you with all my heart.
I think Sacajawea was caught in a series of tragic situations - her kidnapping as a child, her being passed from tribe to tribe, being sold into marriage. However, I never thought of her as a tragic figure. I do not think she was a victim in the way we think of tragic figures.
There's something tragic in the fate of almost every person--it's just that the tragic is often concealed from a person by the banal surface of life.... A woman will complain of indigestion and not even know that what she means is that her whole life has been shattered.
'Fargo' is a tragedy with a happy ending. So you need to have that tragic underpinning, that all of this could be avoidable, and that's what makes it tragic. It's about the use of violence, and the fact that the tension in anticipation of violence and the tension in anticipation of a laugh are sort of the same.
Such exceptional suffering and calamity, then, affecting the hero, and-we must now add-generally extending far and wide beyond him, so as to make the whole scene a scene of woe, are an essential ingredient in tragedy and a chief source of the tragic emotions, and especially of pity. But the proportions of this ingredient, and the direction taken by tragic pity, will naturally vary greatly.
He who climbeth on the highest mountains, laugheth at all tragic plays and tragic realities.
Whenever we remember a series of events, we remember them different. We are constantly changing. It's a flaw, but on the other hand, when we say a word, the meaning is not what you put into it. Rather, the meaning of the word is all of the past usages of that word. Like this cloud that makes up the meaning of the word. It's your subject if you write. For instance what you put in that word and what you assume it means, even its flaw. It has a general agreement.
Dyslexia is a neurological issue, not a character flaw.
Every handsome man had a flaw. It was just her luck that in William's case that flaw was lunacy.
I think even a hero is someone who has sort of the flaw or imperfection of character. I remember Alice Walker saying that once - she'd written a novel about a civil rights hero, and it was someone who had this flaw, this central flaw.
If there is a single tragic flaw that mars our biggest enterprises, it is conservatism - the failure to fail, and fail big, in an era of unprecedented volatility and ambiguity.
Don't underestimate the power of events that happened a long time ago. That is the tragic flaw of modern man.
To see the Republican Party break up the way it has to lose its moral compass it is tragic, it's tragic for me personally, but I won't be part of it. I won't share a party label with people who think it's all right to put babies in internment camps.
The great wheel of fire of ancient wisdom, silence and word engendering the myth of the origin, human action engendering the epic voyage toward the other; historical violence revealing the tragic flaw of the hero who must then return to the land of origin; myth of death and renewal and silence from which new words and images will arise, keeps on turning in spite of the blindness of purely lineal thought.
For every story you hear that's tragic, there's another that's equally tragic or more so. I think you come to look at it as part of life.
The terrible, tragic fallacy of the last hundred years has been to think that all man's troubles are due to his environment, and that to change the man you have nothing to do but change his environment. That is a tragic fallacy. It overlooks the fact that it was in Paradise that man fell.
As a businessman, you have to trust people. To find two people who lied the way [Vick and Petrino] lied, that's unique and that's not Arthur's fault. It's not a flaw of Arthur's. It's a flaw of these two guys.
I actually thought Pope Paul VI was the most tragic figure in the modern church, like Lyndon Johnson was a very tragic figure in politics in some ways.
Annabeth:My fatal flaw. That's what the Sirens showed me. My fatal flaw is hubris. Percy: the brown stuff they spread on veggie sandwiches? Annabeth:No, Seaweed Brain. That's HUMMUS. hubris is worse. Percy: what could be worse than hummus? Annabeth: Hubris means deadly pride, Percy. Thinking you can do things better than anyone else... Even the gods.
Melancholy is a state that I very much enjoy being in, actually. It's not the same as feeling sad. It's a more complex emotion; it derives from a tragic view of the world, a tragic view of art.
Unfortunately, there is something of a flaw in this idealized picture of the way the scientific community discovers truth. And the flaw is that most scientific work never gets noticed. Study after study has shown that most scientific papers are read by almost no one, while a small number of papers are read by many people.
I do that with all of my characters. They have one of the flaws I have, and I zero in on that flaw.
In effect, you're saying that if you knew how you oughtt to live, then the flaw is man could be controlled. If you knew how you ought to live, you wouldn't be forever screwing up the world. perhaps in fact the two things are actually one thing. Perhaps the flaw in man is exactly this: that he doesn't know how he ought to live.
What freedom does a starving man have?" The answer is that starvation is a tragic human condition- perhaps more tragic than loss of freedom. That does not prevent these from being two different things.
Homosexuality is a genetic flaw. — © Subramanian Swamy
Homosexuality is a genetic flaw.
Usually the people that peak in high school are tragic, tragic adults. Most of them end up working for the water department in their hometown and driving around said high school as the decades slip past.
It's the flaw that brings out the beauty.
I'm a coward when it comes to matters of the heart. That is my fatal flaw.
He was royalty. So what? Everyone had a flaw.
There is a tragic flaw in our precious constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
You have many flaws, he announced... “But there was one flaw that made all the other imperfections pale in comparison.” “Was?” she asked. “I don't have this flaw any longer?” “No, you don't.” “Pray tell,” she muttered in exasperation, “what was this terrible flaw?” He grinned. “You used to be English.
In fact, most deaths are not tragic. Few people die because of a flaw in character, which is the essential element of tragedy. They just die.
There's no need to be tragic or destroy yourself or jump off a cliff. That's no longer the paradigm I wish to follow, or that anyone should follow. It is not necessary to be tragic. It's bullshit that women can't have it all. Why not? Other people do.
The Greek tragic mask is one of my main metaphors for the role of the poet. The eyes of the tragic mask are always open to witness even the worst, and the mouth is always open to make poetry from it. Neither ever close.
The flaw is the thing we love. — © Gail Caldwell
The flaw is the thing we love.
The artist sees the tragic to such a degree that he is compelled to express the non-tragic.
You can relate to someone with a flaw.
Todd? Are you still there?" "Yeah. I'm just trying to think of a good reason to continue our friendship." I grinned. "Jealousy is so unattractive Todd." "It would help if you could tell me one thing that's wrong. One flaw. Bad breath? Warts? Some condition that requires anti fungal spray?" "Would chest hair be a flaw?" "Oh, yeah." Todd sounded relieved." I can't stand a chest rug. You can't see the chest cut.
Jewish history has been tragic to the Jews and no less tragic to the neighboring nations who have suffered them. Our major vice of old as of today is parasitism. We are a people of vultures living on the labor and good fortune of the rest of the world.
Better to be a strong man with a weak point, than to be a weak man without a strong point. A diamond with a flaw is more valuable that a brick without a flaw.
Any evaluation which implies rightness or wrongness is a tragic, suicidal expression of an unmet need. Tragic, first because it decreases our likelihood of getting our need met! Even if we think it. And secondly, because it increases the likelihood of violence. That's why I'm suggesting any evaluation which implies rightness or wrongness is a tragic, suicidal expression of an unmet need. Say the need! Learn a need-consciousness.
The sad end he met in Afghanistan was more accurately a function of his stubborn idealism - his insistence on trying to do the right thing. In which case it wasn't a tragic flaw that brought Tillman down, but a tragic virtue.
Sometimes people say, do you want a drink? And I say, oh, I'd like to, but I'm a tragic alcoholic. I always say tragic. I'm a tragic alcoholic.
It's not a character flaw to become an adult.
The 'Beacon Street' record was kind of like a b-side to 'Tragic Kingdom,' but it came out before 'Tragic Kingdom,' so it's a weird situation.
We're on this rock and we can choose to treat each other well or we can choose to kill each other and be uncivilized. I don't know. It's very tragic. It's a very tragic thing to think about.
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