Just as in the ordinary creature the activity of life is all-embracing, so, in the tragic hero, is the process of dying.

--WALTER BENJAMIN, 'Trauerspiel and Tragedy'

What gives to everything tragic, whatever the form in which it appears, the characteristic tendency to the sublime, is the dawning of the knowledge that the world and life can afford us no true satisfaction, and are therefore not worthy our attachment to them. In this the tragic spirit consists; accordingly it leads to resignation [...] the tragic heroes of the ancients show resolute and stoical subjection under the unavoidable blows of fate; the Christian tragedy, on the other hand, shows the giving up of the whole will to live, cheerful abandonment of the world in the consciousness of its worthlessness and vanity. But I am fully of the opinion that the tragedy of the moderns is at a higher level than that of the ancients.

--ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

For the heroes of their tragedies the Greeks generally took royal persons and the moderns for the most part have done the same. This is certainly not because rank gives more dignity to the person who acts or suffers; and as it is merely a question of setting human passions in play, the relative worth of the objects by which this is done is a matter of indifference... [but] the misfortunes of the great and powerful are unconditionally terrible, and are inaccessible even to help from outside; for kings must either help themselves through their own power, or be ruined.

--ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

Tragic heroes speak, as it were, more superficially than they act; the myth does not at all obtain adequate objectification in the spoken word. The structure of the scenes and the visual images reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself can put into words and concepts.

--FREDERICH NIETZSCHE, 'The Birth of Tragedy'

For this is the mark of the self, the seal of its greatness and the token of its weakness alike: it is silent. The tragic hero has only one language that is completely proper to him: silence. It has been so from the very beginning. The tragic devised itself the artistic form of the drama precisely so as to be able to present silence... In his silence the hero burns the bridges connecting him to god and the world, elevates himself above the realm of personality, which in speech, defines itself against others and individualises itself, and so enters the icy loneliness of the self. The self knows of nothing other than itself; its loneliness is absolute. How else can it activate this loneliness, this rigid and defiant self-sufficiency, except in silence. And so it is in the tragedies of Aeschylus, as even contemporaries noticed.

--FRANZ ROZENWEIG

This moment is both a beginning and an end. It gives man a new memory, and a new concept of what is just and good... This life now seems wholly incomprehensible, quite inauthentic and foreign to the realm of essences; and the soul can do nothing more than dream that it was once other than it is now, for its real existence is the one which is now enjoys. All else is but as the dreams dispersed by the chance ringing of a lone and morning bell.

Now the soul stands naked and speaks alone with its naked destiny... Everything vague and uncertain, everything hazy and shaded, has ceased to exist, and there remains only the pure and transparent air which now hides nothing. What we see now are the final question and the final answers.

--LUKACS, 'Soul and Form'

Tragic man remains alone... but he finds, in his very loneliness and suffering, the only values which he can still have and which will be enough to make him great: the absolute and rigorous nature of his own awareness and his own ethical demands, his quest for absolute justice and absolute truth, and his refusal to accept any illusions or compromise

--LUCIEN GOLDMANN, 'The Hidden God'

We have to see not only that suffering is avoidable, but that it is not avoided. And not only that suffering breaks us, but that it need not break us: 'The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are unnecessary'.

--RAYMOND WILLIAMS, 'Modern Tragedy'

Pagan man realises that he is better than his gods, but this realisation strikes him dumb, and it remains unarticulated ... There is here no question whatever of a restitution of the "moral order of the universe", but it is the attempt of moral man, still dumb, still inarticulate - as such he bears the name of hero - to raise himself up amid the agitation of that painful world. The paradox of the birth of the genius in moral speechlessness, moral infantility, constitutes the sublime element in tragedy.

--WALTER BENJAMIN, 'Trauerspiel and Tragedy'

Contemporary man feels sure of himself, feels well-off and clear-headed, when he is himself essentially and fundamentally not present in the autonomous world of a domain of culture and its immanent law of creation. But he feels unsure of himself, feels destitute and deficient in understanding, where he has to do with himself, where he is the centre from which answerable acts or deed issue, in actual and once-occurent life. That is, we act confidently only when we do so not as ourselves, but as those possessed by the immanent necessity of the meaning of some domain or culture.

--M.M. BAKHTIN, 'Toward a Philosophy of the Act'

The true tragic fear becomes an almost impersonal emotion [...] The spectator who is brought face to face with grander sufferings than his own experiences a sympathetic ecstacy, or lifting out of himself. It is precisely in this transport of feeling, which carries a man beyond his individual self, that the distinctive tragic pleasure resides. Pity and fear are purged of the impure element which clings to them in life.

ARISTOTLE, 'The Poetics'

Tragedy is only possible to a mind that which is for the moment agnostic or Manichean

--I.A. RICHARDS, 'Principles of Literary Criticism'

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

[On the child's staging of his mother's absences and presences]:

This game of 'fort/da' resembles tragic drama, which inflicts upon the audience the painful experience of loss, while wresting pleasure out of the aesthetic mastery of that experience.

--MAUD ELLMANN, 'Pyschoanalytic Literary Criticism'

The delight created by tragic myth has the same origin as the delight dissonance in music creates. That primal Dionysiac delight, experienced even in the presence of pain...

--FREDERICH NIETZSCHE, 'The Birth of Tragedy'

In tragedy the terrible side of human life is presented to us, the wail of humanity, the reign of chance and terror, the fall of the just, the triumph of the wicked; thus the aspect of the world which directly strives against our will is brought before our eyes.

At this sight we feel ourselves challenged to turn away our will from life, no longer to will it or love it. But just in this way we become conscious that then there still remains something over to us, which we absolutely cannot know positively, but only negatively, as that which does not will life. As the chord of the seventh demands the fundamental chord; as the colour red demands green, and even produces it in the eye; so every tragedy demands an entirely different kind of existence, another world, the knowledge of which can only be given us indirectly just as here by such a demand.

-- ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, 'The World as Will and Idea'

The tragic hero will show us that in the face of the forces that crush him to death, he maintains untouched the freedom and strength of his own will

--A.C. BRADLEY, 'Shakespearean Tragedy'

In the theatre, more probably than in any other representational mode, likeness, credibility, the underlying gravitational force of the reality principle, are persistent. As they are in the Homeric epics, which are the font of drama. Niobe has seen her ten children slain. Her grief makes stones weep. But as it ebbs, she takes nourishment. Homer insists on this. It is an interposition of daylit truth cardinal also to Shakespeare. The organic is tragi-comic in its very essence. The absolutely tragic is, therefore, not only insupportable to human sensibility: it is false to life.

--GEORGE STEINER

From theatrical action, from the bustle and verbal agility which are the energy of comedy, the romantics transfer Shakespeare’s characters to a dim realm of spirit where Lamb can detach the souls even of Macbeth, Richard III, and Iago from their criminal designs and emphasise the purely intellectual adventurousness which “prompts them to overleap these moral fences”. Making the tragic heroes spiritual athletes exercising in the air was a prelude to the Victorian interpretation of them (institutionalized by AC Bradley) as exemplary victims of the march of the mind, exterminated because their idea of themselves is too costly and partial for the lucid universe to entertain. The nineteenth century moves serenely towards Bradley’s invention of a genre of Shakespearean tragedy, a ghostly Hegelian paradigm which spiritually unites the heroes and reduces the differences between them to local accidents.

But there is no Shakespearean tragedy. There are only the tragedies, and they are special extensions of comedy. When Yeats called Hamlet and Lear gay, he meant that they possessed a frenzied elation, rejoicing in their own destruction. He should have said that, in one important sense, they are merely laughable. Johnson saw that comedy was Shakespeare’s instinct, tragedy his skill, something to be worked at…..

--PETER CONRAD, ‘Shandyism: The Character of Romantic Irony’

Wars, civil wars, revolutions, counter-revolutions, nationalist struggles, uprisings and their repression have been ousted from the realm of tragedy and dispatched to the authority of judges avid to punish. Is this a regression? … Often I think: tragedy has deserted us; and that may be the true punishment.

-- MILAN KUNDERA, 'The Curtain'

After all, comedy not tragedy admits the disorderly into the realm of art.

Is it any wonder that along with our wars, our machines, and our neuroses we should find new meanings in comedy, or that comedy should represent our plight better than tragedy? For tragedy needs the “noble” and nowadays we seldom can assign any usable meaning to “nobility”.

--WYLIE SYPHER, ‘The Meanings of Comedy’

Tragic poetry, which is the most impassioned species of it, strives to carry on the feeling to the utmost point of sublimity or pathos, by all the force of comparison or contrast; loses the sense of present suffering in the imaginary exaggeration of it; exhausts the terror or pity by an unlimited indulgence of it; grapples with impossibilities in its desperate impatience of restraint; throws us back upon the past, forward into the future; brings every moment of our being, or object of nature in startling review before us; and in the rapid whirl of events, lifts us from the depths of woe to the highest contemplation of human life. When Edgar says of Lear, “Nothing but his unkind daughters could have brought him to this”; what a bewildered amazement, what a wrench of the imagination, that cannot be brought to conceive of any other cause of misery than that which has bowed it down, and absorbs all other sorrow in its own! His sorrow, like a flood, supplies the sources of all other sorrow. Again, when he exclaims in the mad scene, “The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanche and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me”, it is passion lending occasion to imagination to make every creature in league against him, conjuring up ingratitude and insult in their least looked-for and most galling shapes, searching every thread and fibre of his heart, and finding out the last remaining image of respect or attachment in the bottom of his breast, only to torture and kill it!

-- WILLIAM HAZLITT, 'On Poetry in General'

Man can no longer say "no" to either life or death. The three great polarities of life are extinguished in this state; man is incapable of knowing or asserting that he is tragic.

--MARIE JAANUS KURRIK, 'Literature and Negation'