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'