Quotes About Sophocles

#1. I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it.

Slavoj Zizek

#2. The idea of withholding a massive secret is obviously quite exciting to some people. It is also the basis of much classic drama, of course, from Sophocles onwards.

Lynne Truss

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

Paul Aron

#4. Sophocles was a general: a warrior writing plays about military situations.

Adam Driver

#5. The director was only invented in the nineteenth century. So directors have only been around for 200 year,s and playwrights have been around since Sophocles and Euripides.

Sarah Ruhl

#6. For instance, I remember someone asking Sophocles, the poet, whether he was still capable of enjoying a woman. 'Don't talk in that way,' he answered; 'I am only too glad to be free of all that; it is like escaping from bondage to a raging madman.

Plato

#7. I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager.

Edgar Allan Poe

#8. There is something bad here, growing. Day and night I watch it. Growing. - Sophocles, Electra

Megan Abbott

#9. Abysmal vermin that I am, I couldn't of course tell her that it was her incredible mother that I wanted to see again ... I knew only as I drove through the cold, night autumn air that somewhere Freud, Sophocles and Eugene O'Neill were laughing.

Woody Allen

#10. 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

#11. If I am Sophocles, I am not mad; and if I am mad, I am not Sophocles.

Sophocles

#12. One must learn by doing the thing; though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try. -Sophocles

Tom Walsh

#13. Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are free from the grasp, not of one mad master only, but of many.

Plato

#14. Remember: women may not be too weak
To strike a blow.
-Sophocles, Electra

Anne Fortier

#15. All men make mistakes,' said the ancient Greek Sophocles. 'But a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only sin is pride.

Ken Follett

#16. One word frees us all the weight and pain of life:
That word is Love.
-Sophocles

Anne Gracie

#17. Sophocles' plays, performed in amphitheaters, were the equivalent of today's megachurches, where customs and values were clarified and conveyed.

Jim Burke

#18. Children are the anchors of a mother's life. - SOPHOCLES, Phaedra, fragment 612

Jodi Picoult

#19. Heracles' heroic world and Deianeira's warmth and tenderness are mutually exclusive. Sophocles seeks not to vindicate the one against the other, but to dramatize the tragedy of their irreconcilability and their mutual destructiveness.

Charles Segal

#20. All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.

John Banville

#21. The history of screenwriting - of what we do - is more than 100 years old. It's thousands of years old, going back to Sophocles and Euripedes. I believe the only - the only - separation for being a dramatist is reading drama.

John Logan

#22. Our heritage as actors goes back thousands of years, and we have to feel as comfortable in the clothes, and the language of Sophocles as we do in our sneakers.

Stella Adler

#23. Friend, hast thou considered the "rugged, all-nourishing earth," as Sophocles well names her; how she feeds the sparrow on the housetop, much more her darling man?

Thomas Carlyle

#24. Sophocles said he drew men as they ought to be, and Euripides as they were.

Aristotle.

#25. If women were once permitted to read Sophocles and work with logarithms, or to nibble at any side of the apple of knowledge, there would be an end forever to their sewing on buttons and embroidering slippers.

Anna Julia Cooper

#26. How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question, How does love suit with age, Sophocles, - are you still the man you were? Peace, he replied; most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master.

Plato

#27. On Juan Rulfo:
His published writings add up to no more than 300 pages, but they are just as many, and I believe just as enduring, as those that we know of Sophocles.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#28. The power of fate is a wonder; dark, terrible wonder. Neither wealth nor armies, towered walls nor ships, Black hulls lashed by the salt, can save us from that force. - Sophocles

John R. Hale

#29. Heaven never helps the man who will not help himself

Sophocles

#30. I have seen or heard of no other man whom destiny treated with such enmity as it did Philoktetes

Sophocles

#31. In season, all is good.

Sophocles

#32. When you can prove me wrong, then call me blind.

Sophocles

#33. If men live decently it is because discipline saves their very lives for them.

Sophocles

#34. To him who is afraid, everything rustles.

Sophocles

#35. All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.

Sophocles

#36. Fortune cannot aid those who do nothing.

Sophocles

#37. You're in love with impossibility

Sophocles

#38. I well believe it, to unwilling ears; None love the messenger who brings bad news

Sophocles

#39. Though a man be wise it is no shame for him to live and learn.

Sophocles

#40. Brave hearts do not back down back off.

Sophocles

#41. But nothing else escapes all-ruinous time.
Earth's might decays, the might of men decays,
Honor grows cold, dishonor flourishes,
There is no constancy 'twixt friend and friend,
Or city and city; be it soon or late,
Sweet turns to bitter, hate once more to love.

Sophocles

#42. Men whose wit has been mother of villainy once have learned from it to be evil in all things.

Sophocles

#43. There is no greater evil than anarchy.

Sophocles

#44. It's impossible to speak what it is not noble to do.

Sophocles

#45. It is hope that maintains most of mankind.

Sophocles

#46. Not to be born surpasses all reckoning. The next best thing by far, when one has been born is to go back as swiftly as possible whence one came.

Sophocles

#47. False words do not bring forth fruit.

Sophocles

#48. I could not turn away from anyone
Like you, a stranger, or refuse to help him.
I know well, being mortal, that my claim
Upon the future is no more than yours.

Sophocles

#49. There is much that is strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness

Sophocles

#50. I see that all of us who live are nothing but images or insubstantial shadow.

Sophocles

#51. We have only a little time to please the living. But all eternity to love the dead.

Sophocles

#52. Mad are thy subjects all, and even the wisest heart
Straight to folly will fall, at a touch of thy poisoned dart.

Sophocles

#53. Sentry: King, may I speak?
Creon: Your very voice distresses me.
Sentry: Are you sure that it is my voice, and not your conscience?
Creon: By God, he wants to analyze me now!
Sentry: It is not what I say, but what has been done, that hurts you.
Creon: You talk too much.

Sophocles

#54. You must remember that no one lives a life free from pain and suffering.

Sophocles

#55. Upon that foreign soil he chose
Died he! For ever laid
Low, in the kindly shade,
He left behind no tearless grief,
No measured mourning, dull and brief,
These eyes are wet
With weeping yet,
Nor know I how to find relief."

Antigone

Sophocles

#56. A city which belongs to just one man is no true city

Sophocles

#57. Alas! How sad when reasoners reason wrong.

Sophocles

#58. Ugly deeds are taught by ugly deeds.

Sophocles

#59. For whoever knows how to return a kindness he has received must be a friend above all price.

Sophocles

#60. A State for one man is no State at all.

Sophocles

#61. The man from whom the joys of life have departed is living no more, but should be counted with the dead.

Sophocles

#62. Henceforth ye may thieve with better knowledge whence lucre should be won, and learn that it is not well to love gain from every source. For thou wilt find that ill-gotten pelf brings more men to ruin than to weal.

Sophocles

#63. It is not right if I am wrong. But if I am young, and right, what does my age matter?

Sophocles

#64. Do not grieve yourself too much for those you hate, nor yet forget them utterly.

Sophocles

#65. A short saying often contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

#66. Creon: Why not? You and the whole breed of seers are mad for money.
Tiresias: And the whole race of tyrants lusts for filthy gain.

Sophocles

#67. When I have tried and failed, I shall have failed.

Sophocles

#68. It is the merit of a general to impart good news, and to conceal the truth.

Sophocles

#69. Children are the anchors that hold a mother to life.

Sophocles

#70. Inviolable, untrod; goddesses,
Dread brood of Earth and Darkness, here abide.

Sophocles

#71. It made our hair stand up in panic fear.

Sophocles

#72. Fortune raises up and fortune brings low both the man who fares well and the one who fares badly; and there is no prophet of the future for mortal men.

Sophocles

#73. There is some pleasure even in words, when they bring forgetfulness of present miseries.

Sophocles

#74. It is God's giving if we laugh or weep.

Sophocles

#75. Of course you cannot know a man completely,
his character, his principles, sense of judgment,
not till he's shown his colors, ruling the people,
making laws. Experience, there's the test.

Sophocles

#76. ( ... ) I, for one, prize less
The name of king than deeds of kingly power;
And so would all who learn in wisdom's school.

Sophocles

#77. If you have done terrible things, you must endure terrible things; for thus the sacred light of injustice shines bright.

Sophocles

#78. Gratitude to gratitude always gives birth.

Sophocles

#79. It is best not to have been born at all: but, if born, as quickly as possible to return whence one came.

Sophocles

#80. Trust dies but mistrust blossoms.

Sophocles

#81. Those who jump to conclusions may go wrong.

Sophocles

#82. The gods plant reason in mankind, of all good gifts the highest.

Sophocles

#83. You clearly hate to yield, but you will regret it when your anger has passed. Such natures are justly the hardest for themselves to bear.

Sophocles

#84. ODYSSEUS I cannot recommend a rigid spirit.

Sophocles

#85. Let a man nobly live or nobly die.

Sophocles

#86. And if you find I've lied, from this day on call the prophet blind.

Sophocles

#87. War loves to seek its victims in the young.

Sophocles

#88. Rather throw away that which is dearest to you, your own life, than turn away a good friend.

Sophocles

#89. Reason is God's crowning gift to man.

Sophocles

#90. Remember, nothing succeeds without toil.

Sophocles

#91. In darkness one may be ashamed of what one does, without the shame of disgrace.

Sophocles

#92. No honest man will argue on every side

Sophocles

#93. Money - you demolish cities, root men from their homes, you train and twist good minds and set them on to the most atrocious schemes. No limit, you make them adept at every kind of outrage, every godless crime - money

Sophocles

#94. Love, unconquerable, Waster of rich men, keeper Of warm lights and all-night vigil In the soft face of a girl: Sea-wanderer, forest-visitor! Even the pure immortals cannot escape you, And mortal man, in his one day's dusk, Trembles before your glory.

Sophocles

#95. The man the state has put in place must have obedient hearing to his least command when it is right, and even when it's not.

Sophocles

#96. Opportunity has power over all things.

Sophocles

#97. There is no happiness where there is no wisdom ...

Sophocles

#98. To throw away an honest friend is, as it were, to throw your life away

Sophocles

#99. All men make mistakes.

Sophocles

#100. Haemon: No city is property of a single man.
Creon: But custom gives possession to the ruler.
Haemon: You'd rule a desert beautifully alone.

Sophocles