Oedipus The King Quotes

The pain we inflict upon ourselves hurt most of all.

They are dying, the old oracles sent to Laius, now our masters strike them off the rolls. Nowhere Apollo's golden glory now -- the gods, the gods go down.

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.

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

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

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.

To a terrible place which men’s ears             may not hear of, nor their eyes see it.

Prometheus: Yes, I stopped mortals from foreseeing their doom. Chorus: What cure did you discover for that sickness? Prometheus: I sowed in them blind hopes.

Of all ill, Self-chosen sorrows are the worst to bear.

just thinking of all your days to come, the bitterness, the life that rough mankind will thrust upon you.

Comply, and fear not, for my load of woe Is incommunicable to all but me.

Your edict, King, was strong, But all your strength is weakness itself against The immortal unrecorded laws of God. They are not merely now: they were, and shall be, Operative for ever, beyond man utterly. I knew I must die, even without your decree: I am only mortal. And if I must die Now, before it is my time to die, Surely this is no hardship: can anyone Living, as I live, with evil all about me, Think Death less than a friend?

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

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

Kings hate to hear the things they order spoken.

Many years have passed since OEDIPUS solved the riddle of the Sphinx and ascended the throne of Thebes, and now a plague has struck the city.

Good news. I tell you even the hardest things to bear, if they should turn out well, all would be well.

Banish the man, or pay back blood with blood. Murder sets the plague-storm on the city.

You criticize my temper ... unaware of the one you live with, you revile me.

The truth with all its power lives inside me.

I pity you, flinging at me the very insults each man here will fling at you so soon.

Blind, lost in the night, endless night that nursed you!

True, it is not your fate to fall at my hands. Apollo is quite enough,

Creon is not your downfall, no, you are your own.

You are the king no doubt, but in one respect, at least, I am your equal: the right to reply.

I am not your slave. I serve Apollo.

What good were eyes to me? Nothing I could see could bring me joy.

so I believed—what a handsome prince you raised— under the skin, what sickness to the core.

None of your power follows you through life.

Who would choose uneasy dreams to don a crown when all the kingly sway can be enjoyed without?

It’s no city at all, owned by one man alone.

A herdsman, were you? A vagabond, scraping for wages? MESSENGER: Your savior too, my son, in your worst hour.

Brothers in old age, two of a kind, he and our guest here.

Greece and Poverty,” said the historian Herodotus, “have always been bedfellows”;

The sea was the true center of the Greek world: “we live round the sea,” says Plato’s Socrates, “like frogs . . . around a pond.

Dionysus is the life-spirit of all green vegetation—ivy, pine tree and especially the vine; he is, in Dylan Thomas’ phrase, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.

Rose the joint evil that is now o’erflowing. And the old happiness in that past day Was truly happy, but the present hour Hath pain, crime, ruin:—whatsoe’er of ill Mankind have named, not one is absent here.

When the Greek mercenaries of Xenophon’s Anabasis, after months of marching and fighting in the mountains of Turkey, finally reached the Black Sea, one of them said, thankfully, “Now I can go home like Odysseus, flat on my back.

What’s the good of glory, magnificent renown, if in its flow it steams away to nothing?

raging plague in all its vengeance, devastating the house of Cadmus!

Burn that god of death that all gods hate!

Laius was killed, they say, by certain travelers.

How terrible—to see the truth when the truth is only pain to him who sees! I knew it well, but I put it from my mind, else I never would have come.

None of you knows— and I will never reveal my dreadful secrets, not to say your own.

What will come will come. Even if I shroud it all in silence.

You are the curse, the corruption of the land!

I say you are the murderer you hunt.

Indeed, if the truth has any power.

No, but I came by, Oedipus the ignorant,

you’ll pay in tears, I promise you, for this, this witch-hunt.

You with your precious eyes, you’re blind to the corruption of your life,

Soon, soon you’ll scream aloud—what haven won’t reverberate?

And a crowd of other horrors you’d never dream will level you with yourself and all your children.

No man will ever be rooted from the earth as brutally as you.

I would never have come if you hadn’t called me here.

If I thought you would blurt out such absurdities, you’d have died waiting before I’d had you summoned.

This day will bring your birth and your destruction.

Your great good fortune, true, it was your ruin.

Are you quite finished? It’s your turn to listen for just as long as you’ve ... instructed me. Hear me out, then judge me on the facts.

Look, if you think crude, mindless stubbornness such a gift, you’ve lost your sense of balance

I don’t know. And when I don’t, I keep quiet.

But now I have a right to learn from you as you just learned from me.

who in his right mind would rather rule and live in anxiety than sleep in peace?

No one with any sense of self-control.

A man of sense, someone who sees things clearly would never resort to treason.

But don’t convict me on sheer unverified surmise.

How wrong it is to take the good for bad, purely at random, or take the bad for good.

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

I think you’re insane.

What if you’re wholly wrong?

Not if you rule unjustly.

My city too, not yours alone!

Have you no sense? Poor misguided men, such shouting—why this public outburst? Aren’t you ashamed, with the land so sick, to stir up private quarrels?

Aren’t you ashamed, with the land so sick, to stir up private quarrels?

Oh god, believe it, Oedipus, honor the solemn oath he swears to heaven. Do it for me, for the sake of all your people.

But the heart inside me sickens, dies as the land dies and now on top of the old griefs you pile this, your fury—both of you!

Look at you, sullen in yielding, brutal in your rage— you will go too far. It’s perfect justice: natures like yours are hardest on themselves

For the love of god, Oedipus, tell me too, what is it? Why this rage? You’re so unbending.

Strange, hearing you just now ... my mind wandered, my thoughts racing back and forth.

My god, my god—what have you planned to do to me?

Oh no no, I think I’ve just called down a dreadful curse upon myself

I have a terrible fear the blind seer can see.

Destiny guide me always Destiny find me filled with reverence pure in word and deed.

Pride breeds the tyrant violent pride, gorging, crammed to bursting with all that is overripe and rich with ruin— clawing up to the heights, headlong pride

crashes down the abyss—sheer doom! No footing helps, all foothold lost and gone.

If he cannot reap his profits fairly cannot restrain himself from outrage— mad, laying hands on the holy things untouchable!

Can such a man, so desperate, still boast he can save his life from the flashing bolts of god? If all such violence goes with honor now why join the sacred dance?

They are dying, the old oracles sent to Laius, now our masters strike them off the rolls. Nowhere Apollo’s golden glory now— the gods, the gods go down.

Nowhere Apollo’s golden glory now— the gods, the gods go down.

Look at us, passengers in the grip of fear, watching the pilot of the vessel go to pieces.

A light tip of the scales can put old bones to rest.

What should a man fear? It’s all chance, chance rules our lives.

Live, Oedipus, as if there’s no tomorrow!

Only fools think that they alone Are wise, and hear no other point of view. À wise man is never ashamed to learn, To listen, and bend when the time is right. When a flood sweeps through a forest, the trees That bend survive, keep every leaf intact; The ones that don't snap off and are swept away. A wise man knows when to slacken sail; À fool refuses and overturns his ship.

But if any man comes striding, high and mighty in all he says and does, no fear of justice, no reverence for the temples of the gods— let a rough doom tear him down, repay his pride, breakneck, ruinous pride!

You are the king no doubt, but in one respect, at least, I am your equal: the right to reply. I claim that privilege too. I am not your slave. I serve Apollo. I don't need Creon to speak for me in public. So, you mock my blindness? Let me tell you this. You with your precious eyes, you're blind to the corruption in your life, to the house you live in, those you live with- who are your parents? Do you know? All unknowing you are the scourge of your own flesh and blood, the dead below the earth and the living here above, and the double lash of your mother and your father's curse will whip you from this land one day, their footfall treading you down in terror, darkness shrouding your eyes that now can see the light! Soon, soon, you'll scream aloud - what haven won't reverberate? What rock of Cithaeron won't scream back in echo? That day you learn the truth about your marriage, the wedding-march that sang you into your halls, the lusty voyage home to the fatal harbor! And a crowd of other horrors you'd never dream will level you with yourself and all your children. There. Now smear us with insults - Creon, myself and every word I've said. No man will ever be rooted from the earth as brutally as you.

One modern oratorio adaptation, The Gospel at Colonus (by Lee Breuer and Bob Telson, 1989), based on Robert Fitzgerald’s translation in our series, has been acclaimed by critics and audiences as a high point of twentieth-century adaptation of Greek tragedy.

All unknowing you are the scourge of your own flesh and blood, the dead below the earth and the living here above, and the double lash of your mother and your father’s curse will whip you from this land one day, their footfall treading you down in terror, darkness shrouding your eyes that now can see the light!

For if there are no waving flags and marching songs at the barricades as Walter marches out with his little battalion, it is not because the battle lacks nobility. On the contrary, he has picked up in his way, still imperfect and wobbly in his small view of human destiny, what I believe Arthur Miller once called "the golden threat of history." He becomes, in spite of those who are too intrigued with despair and hatred of man to see it, King Oedipus refusing to tear out his eyes, but attacking the Oracle instead. He is that last Jewish patriot manning his rifle at Warsaw; he is that young girl who swam into sharks to save a friend a few weeks ago; he is Anne Frank, still believing in people; he is the nine small heroes of Little Rock; he is Michelangelo creating David and Beethoven bursting forth with the Ninth Symphony. He is all those things because he has finally reached out in his tiny moment and caught that sweet essence which is human dignity, and it shines like the old star-touched dream that it is in his eyes.

Oedipus Rex vs. Tyrannosaurus Rex Oedipus Rex, a tragedy by Sophocles, chronicles the story of Oedipus, a man who becomes the king of Thebes while in the process unwittingly fulfilling a prophecy that he would murder his pops Laius and marry his mom Jocasta. Tyrannosaurus Rex , commonly abbreviated to T. Rex, was a big fucking dinosaur that kicked ass during the Jurassic period. My point? My point is there doesn't have to be a point if you have already hooked the reader with a catchy title. And the winner is... Steven Spielberg