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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

Kings hate to hear the things they order spoken.

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

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.

None of your power follows you through life.

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.

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

I am not your slave. I serve Apollo.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

Oed. Must I not fear my mother’s marriage-bed?

The Greeks, who gave us history, philosophy and political science, never managed to solve the problems posed by their political disunity;

Reserved for the priest of Dionysus

Well, I will start afresh and once again Make dark things clear.

So, when I am nothing—then am I a man?

A man’s anger can never age and fade away, not until he dies. The dead alone feel no pain.

Look through all humanity: you’ll never find a man on earth, if a god leads him on, who can escape his fate.

Never honor the gods in one breath and take the gods for fools the next.

But surely they will shroud my corpse with Theban dust?

Now as we keep our watch and wait the final day, count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.

I stumbled on you, down the woody Hanks of Mount Cithaeron.

O god— all come true, all burst to light! O light—now let me look my last on you!

O the generations of men92 the dying generations—adding the total of all your lives I find they come to nothing

How, how could the furrows your father plowed bear you, your agony, harrowing on in silence O so long?

Oh how she wept, mourning the marriage-bed where she let loose that double brood—monsters— husband by her husband, children by her child.

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

Blind who now has eyes, beggar who now is rich, he will grope his way toward a foreign soil, a stick tapping before him step by step.

Acceptance—that is the great lesson suffering teaches, suffering and the long years . . .

Acceptance—that is the great lesson suffering teaches,

And if my present actions strike you as foolish, let’s just say I’ve been accused of folly by a fool.

[they] reason’d high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate, Fixt Fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost. (Paradise Lost 2.658

Sophocles had his full share of such rewards, for we have evidence that he won the first prize at the Dionysia eighteen times, and it is recorded that he never won the third prize.

Yea, Oedipus, my sovereign lord and king,

Now what a black sea of terror has overwhelmed him. Now as we keep our watch and wait the final day, count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.

Who could behold his greatness without envy?

I tell you the truth, you gave me life my breath leapt up in you and now you bring down night upon my eyes.

I tell you neither the waters of the Danube nor the Nile can wash this palace clean.

No, I can’t repeat it, it’s unholy.

Now he’ll tear himself from his native earth, not linger, curse the house with his own curse.

O the terror— the suffering, for all the world to see, the worst terror that ever met my eyes. What madness swept over you?

My destiny, my dark power, what a leap you made!

What superhuman power drove you on? OEDIPUS: Apollo, friends, Apollo— he ordained my agonies—these, my pains on pains!

But the hand that struck my eyes was mine, mine atone—no one else— I did it all myself! What good were eyes to me? Nothing I could see could bring me joy.

What love, what call of the heart can touch my ears with joy? Nothing, friends.

Pitiful, you suffer so, you understand so much ... I wish you had never known.

If I’d died then, I’d never have dragged myself, my loved ones through such hell.

What grief can crown this grief? It’s mine alone, my destiny—I am Oedipus!

I’d wall up my loathsome body like a prison, blind to the sound of life, not just the sight.

Home you’ll come, in tears, cut off from the sight of it all, the brilliant rites unfinished.

Time is the great healer, you will see.

I try to say what I mean; it’s my habit.

you brought my sperm rising back, springing to light fathers, brothers, sons—one murderous breed— brides, wives, mothers.

Don’t let them go begging, abandoned, women without men.

Never bring them down to the level of my pains.

Laius was killed, they say, by certain travelers.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

My sisters, you, his daughters! Now that you’ve heard our father’s iron curses, I implore you in the name of the gods, if father’s curses all come true at last, and if some way back to Thebes is found for you, don’t neglect me, please, give me burial, the honored rites of death.

But this material offered more than variety of dramatic incident. These myths were the only national memory of the remote past, of a time before the Greeks invented the alphabet, so that, shifting and changing though they might be, they had the authority, for the audience, of what we call history.

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.

The prizes were awarded at the end by ten judges, elected on the opening day by lot and sworn to impartiality. Feelings often ran high, and these judges must have been under considerable pressure from the audience. In 468 B.C., the year in which Sophocles first entered the contest, competing against Aeschylus, the tension was such that the magistrate appointed as judges the ten elected generals for that year, among them Cimon, the hero of the naval crusade against Persia. (They gave Sophocles the first prize.)

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

As in most modern narratives, a character’s fate depended on human actions, his and others. King Lear’s Gloucester may complain about human fate as “flies to wanton boys,” but it’s Lear’s vanity that sets in motion the dramatic arc of the play. From the Enlightenment onward, the individual occupied center stage. But now I lived in a different world, a more ancient one, where human action paled against superhuman forces, a world that was more Greek tragedy than Shakespeare. No amount of effort can help Oedipus and his parents escape their fates; their only access to the forces controlling their lives is through the oracles and seers, those given divine vision. What I had come for was not a treatment plan—I had read enough to know the medical ways forward—but the comfort of oracular wisdom.