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

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'