Tragic Hero Quotes:

Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.

- Adam Phillips

topic: Hero, Mean, Ends, Pragmatists, Tragic Hero

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.

- W. H. Auden

topic: Hero, Law, Suffering, Tragic Hero

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 to this terrible discovery of his fundamental ignorance - he is not the measure of all things but the thing measured and found wanting.

- Robert Fagles

topic: Hero, Ignorance, Men, Tragic Hero

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

- Mason Cooley

topic: Hero, Winning, Play, Tragic Hero

Tragic heroes always moan when the gods take an interest in them, but it's the people the gods ignore who get the really tough deals

- Terry Pratchett

source: Terry Pratchett (2009). “Mort: (Discworld Novel 4)”, p.16, Random House

topic: Hero, People, Tough, Tragic Hero

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

- William Shakespeare

source: 'Othello' (1602-4) act 3, sc. 3, l. 165

topic: Jealousy, Envy, Tragedy, Jealous And Envy, Jealous Love

If I was white I would have been like John Wayne... I feel like a tragic hero in a Shakespeare play

- Tupac Shakur

topic: Hero, Play, White, Shakespeare Play, Tragic Hero

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

- Edmond Rostand

topic: Hero, Faces, Danger, Tragic Hero

Adolescents are attracted to tragic heroes. That's why rock stars dress like homeless people. Adolescence is a fall. It's when every child becomes an orphan.

- Heather O'Neill

topic: Stars, Children, Fall, Tragic Hero, Homeless People

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below

- Claudius

topic: My Thoughts, Thoughts And Prayers, Morality In Hamlet, Mortality In Hamlet, Polonius