Quotes About Oedipus

#1. The novelist is condemned to wander all his life. Homeless and blind like Oedipus he wanders until death. And so let us protect the novelist and adore him, with pity, honor, and love.

Roman Payne

#2. Until now when we have started to talk about the uniqueness of America we have almost always ended by comparing ourselves to Europe. Toward her we have felt all the attraction and repulsions of Oedipus

Daniel J. Boorstin

#3. Plato did claim that the unexamined life was not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure.

Tom Robbins

#4. I remember the first time I read Freud, I was 25 or 30, and I was expecting it to be about the Oedipus complex. But what I actually discovered confirmed my own common experience, that you also had little boys who loved their fathers and little girls who loved their mothers.

Arnaud Desplechin

#5. It struck me that my backside was my best asset and that keeping it hidden would be like Oedipus pulling out his eyes so that he couldn't see the errors of the past.

Chloe Thurlow

#6. Samoa culture demonstrates how much the tragic or the easy solution of the Oedipus situation depends upon the inter-relationship between parents and children, and is not created out of whole cloth by the young child's biological impulses.

Margaret Mead

#7. The population question is the real riddle of the sphinx, to which no political Oedipus has as yet found the answer. In view of the ravages of the terrible monster over-multiplication, all other riddle sink into insignificance.

Thomas Huxley

#8. I keep coming back to it, over and over - adultery and cheating. It's the most interesting problem in the theater. How else do you get Oedipus? That's the first cheating in the theater.

Mike Nichols

#9. To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, I wish I had known this some time ago.

Roger Zelazny

#10. Like it or not, after Freud, no one had to read Sophocles to know something about Oedipus.

Paul Aron

#11. Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition. Let Othello subject Desdemona to a lie-detector test; his jealousy will still blind him to the evidence. Let Oedipus triumph over gravity; he won't triumph over his fate.

Arthur Koestler

#12. I pity the young woman who will attempt to insinuate herself between my mama's boy and me. I sympathize with the monumental nature of her task. It will take a crowbar, two bulldozers and half a dozen Molotov cocktails to pry my Oedipus and me loose from one another.

Ayelet Waldman

#13. My husband, who's the greatest actor in the world, can do anything. Look at what he did in The Critic and Oedipus. In every role he gets-he did this in Richard the Third-there's nothing he can't do, nothing. Just nothing.

Vivien Leigh

#14. The sexual wishes in regard to the mother become more intense and the father is perceived as an obstacle to the; this gives rise to the Oedipus complex.

Sigmund Freud

#15. The wisdom to recognize and halt follows the know-how to pollute past rescue. The treaty's signed, but the cancer ticks in your bones. Until I'd murdered my father and fornicated my mother I wasn't wise enough to see I was Oedipus.

John Barth

#16. The two greatest plays ever written were Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, and they're both about father-son relationships.

Arthur Miller

#17. Then there're Theseus, Oedipus, Peleus, Orpheus, Jason and Hercules all waiting to be untangled, since their various deeds are running crisscross through my mind like multicolored threads in a dress. Myron

Anne Frank

#18. I was a real mummy's girl - still am. And as for my father, well, I have an Oedipus complex I'm still working out. I love that man!

Shakira

#19. As Oedipus learned, the more you run away from what is predetermined the more you run toward it.

M.J. Rose

#20. Ignorance is bliss-Oedipus ruined a great sex life by asking too many questions.

Stephen Colbert

#21. Oedipus gouges out his eyes, Jocasta hangs herself, both guiltless; the play has come to a harmonious conclusion. Wrote Schiller.

David Markson

#22. Only a philosopher would consider taking Oedipus as a model for a normal, unproblematic relation between an action and the maxim of the act.

Jerry A. Fodor

#23. Throughout history, human nature remains unchanged. The world's oldest questions are still being asked. Medea, Oedipus, we're not adding anything that the Greeks didn't already know.

Christopher Fowler

#24. Psychoanalysts are bent on producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture. It is Oedipus who produces man in this fashion and who gives a structure to the false movement of infinite progression and regression

Gilles Deleuze

#25. Whose tale more sad than thine, whose lot more dire? O Oedipus, discrowned head, Thy cradle was thy marriage bed.

Sophocles

#26. Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.

Umberto Eco

#27. One Jewish lady was talking to the neighbor, and she said, "The psychoanalyst who is treating my son has said that my son suffers from an Oedipus complex." And the neighbor lady said, "Oedipus schmoedipus! Doesn't matter as long as he is a good boy and loves his mother!

Osho

#28. Life is short, but art is long. Sophocles is dead, but Oedipus lives on ... Each of us when we read a great piece of literature is a little more human than befor

James W. Sire

#29. OEDIPUS:
O, O, O, they will all come,
all come out clearly! Light of the sun, let me
look upon you no more after today!
I who first saw the light bred of a match
accursed, and accursed in my living
with them I lived with, cursed in my killing.

Sophocles

#30. I got Oedipus off the incest charge
technicality, of course
he didn't know it was his mother at the time.

Jasper Fforde

#31. The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.

Joseph Campbell

#32. Oedipus had to abandon his certainty, his clarity, and supposed insight in order to become aware of the dark ambiguity of the human condition.

Karen Armstrong

#33. Every time one can write a self-deluded song, you are way ahead of the game, way ahead. Self-delusion is the basis of nearly all the great scenes in all the great plays, from 'Oedipus' to 'Hamlet.'

Stephen Sondheim

#34. Weep not, everything must have its day.

Sophocles

#35. Ignorance is no cure for suffering.

Seneca.

#36. In a just cause the weak will beat the strong!

Sophocles

#37. King as thou art, free speech at least is mine. To make reply; in this I am thy peer.

Sophocles

#38. You, you'll see no more the pain I suffered, all the pain I caused! Too long you looked on the ones you never should have seen, blind to the ones you longed to see, to know! Blind from this hour on! Blind in the darkness-blind!

Sophocles

#39. Kings hate to hear the things they order spoken.

Seneca.

#40. When things are at their worst,
there are no tears.

Seneca.

#41. No delicate breeze brings comfort with icy breath of wind
to the hearts which pant on the flames.

Seneca.

#42. It is not in words that I should wish my life to be distinguished, but rather in things done.

Sophocles

#43. What you cannot enforce, do not command!

Sophocles

#44. Time alone can bring the just man to light - the criminal you can spot in just one short day.

Sophocles

#45. Closer,
it's all right. Touch the man of grief.
Do. Don't be afraid. My troubles are mine
and I am the only man alive who can sustain them.

Sophocles

#46. The surest way for those who want to rule
is praising moderation, talking of peace and quiet.

Seneca.

#47. Thou lov'st to speak in riddles and dark words.

Sophocles

#48. The pains we inflict upon ourselves hurt most most of all.

Sophocles

#49. Give me a life wherever there is an opportunity to live, and better life than was my father's.

Sophocles

#50. How dreadful the knowledge of the truth can be
When there's no help in truth.

Sophocles

#51. The pain we inflict upon ourselves hurt most of all.

Sophocles

#52. Restless people often pretend to be calm.

Seneca.

#53. Truth often harms the one who digs it up.

Seneca.

#54. By God, I'll have more booty in a moment.

Sophocles

#55. In times of happiness, no point in shaking things up.
But in a time of crisis, the safest thing is change.

Seneca.

#56. What's the good of glory, magnificent renown, if in its flow it steams away to nothing?

Oedipus

#57. Here all guilt ceases, for it cannot cling to such flowers as these.

Gilles Deleuze

#58. I thought of my mother ( ... ). Freud wrote that no man is secure in the love of his mother can ever be a failure. Well, I had been busy proving that theory wrong.

Scott Spencer