What is "tragic"

Usage examples of "tragic".

Yoshida was apotheosized soon afterward as one of the heroes of modern Japan, a perfect symbol of purity of purpose and tragic sacrifice.

The consequences of this archetypal error are known, tragic, and continuing.

Still she carried on, just as besotted and tragic as that desperate teenage boy, clinging to her fragile happiness.

Unwilling to entertain this tragic thought, the overwrought Blotto made a final effort.

Nevertheless it is my duty to disclose at least one of the secrets of the Brassey family and that, I assure you, the darkest, in order that the intrepid men now listening to our tragic history may enter upon their task with open eyes.

But a most unexpected circumstance prevented our attending the ball, and brought forth a comedy with a truly tragic turn.

Every so often these babies appeared, and they always met with tragic ends: they killed themselves, they ran off and became circus performers, they were seen years later in Bursa, begging or prostituting themselves.

The genius of Piranesi, almost mediumistic, has truly caught the element of hallucination here: he has sensed the long-continued rituals of mourning, the tragic architecture of an inner world.

But it was also spectacular, part of the grandness of a sweeping event, like the vivid scene in the switching yard or the people trudging across the snowy overpass with children, food, belongings, a tragic army of the dispossessed.

Starbucks tragic fate, and the bewildering, paranoiac words of Commander Dupree.

Unlike the revered Sarah Siddons, who first trod the boards in Drury Lane more than a quarter of a century before, India Parr was not foremost a tragic actress.

It was widely agreed that while her tragic heroines were most excellently realized, Miss Parr had a particular gift for the nuance of character in the comedies, and the sharp timing and physical humor of farces.

She closed her eyelids once more, she shivered, and the colour left her cheeks as, in her fancy, she again beheld the tragic city--that line of quays stretching away in a furnace-like blaze, the deep moat of the river, with its leaden waters obstructed by huge black masses, lighters looking like lifeless whales, and bristling with motionless cranes which stretched forth gallows-like arms.

Over all the earth at once, now that the roar of the engine had stopped, there was an immense and brooding quietness, a drowsed autumnal fume and warmth, immensely desolate and mournful, holding somehow a tragic prophecy of winter that must come, and death, and yet touched with the lonely, mournful and exultant mystery of the earth.

The tune of an incantation, a significant cry, the mien of the operator, these too have a natural leading power over the soul upon which they are directed, drawing it with the force of mournful patterns or tragic sounds--for it is the reasonless soul, not the will or wisdom, that is beguiled by music, a form of sorcery which raises no question, whose enchantment, indeed, is welcomed, exacted, from the performers.