The tragic hero usurps the function of the gods and…

“If this were a fairy tale, this would be the part where the fishboy appears and Diana shoots him through the heart. Because he…

— Hannah Moskowitz

The catastrophe of the tragic hero thus becomes the catastrophe of the fifth-century man; all his furious energy and intellectual daring drive him on…

— Robert Fagles

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock The meat it feeds on.

— William Shakespeare

The tragic hero prefers death to prudence. The comedian prefers playing tricks to winning. Only the villain really plays to win.

— Mason Cooley

“Tragedy is born of myth, not morality. Prometheus and Icarus are tragic heroes. Yet none of the myths in which they appear has anything…

— John Gray

“Perhaps Aristotle’s most widely-read work is his esoteric treatise on aesthetics, the Poetics. According to his analysis of tragic poetry (a section on comedy…

— The New York Times

“To joke in the face of danger is the supreme politeness, a delicate refusal to cast oneself as a tragic hero; panache is therefore…

— Edmond Rostand

“You care for empresses and queens?” I asked him. “No. For tragic heroines.” “Why them?” “Suffering and courageous women who deserve their own immortality.”

— Ronald Frame

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below

— Claudius

“the essence of tragedy is time, or rather the lack of it. There is no problem in any Greek tragedy that could not have…

— Mortimer J. Adler

The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him…

— W. H. Auden

“SHAKESPEARE What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more…

— Ronald Carter

In sports, I refused to do any interviews that were just going to become human-interest stories. Don't turn me into a tragic heroine.

— Aimee Mullins

To joke in the face of danger is the supreme politeness, a delicate refusal to cast oneself as a tragic hero.

— Edmond Rostand

“If this were a fairy tale, this would be the part where the fishboy appears and Diana shoots him through the heart. Because he…

— Hannah Moskowitz