Sophocles Quotes

One word Frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.

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.

And indeed it was, the arrow still protruding from its wet, grayish skin, humping its body along with incredible speed. A flick of its tail caught the edge of a statue, sending it flying into the dry ornamental pool, where it shattered into dust. “By the Angel, it just crushed Sophocles,” noted Will. “Has no one respect for the classics these days?

Fortune is not on the side of the faint-hearted.

Go then if you must, but remember, no matter how foolish your deeds, those who love you will love you still.

One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.

The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.

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

A man, though wise, should never be ashamed of learning more, and must unbend his mind.

I have no desire to suffer twice, in reality and then in retrospect.

If you try to cure evil with evil you will add more pain to your fate.

Fear? What has a man to do with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day.

There's nothing in the world so demoralizing as money.

Time, which sees all things, has found you out.

I was born to join in love, not hate - that is my nature.

Tomorrow is tomorrow. Future cares have future cures, And we must mind today.

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

You can kill a man but you cant kill a idea.

How dreadful the knowledge of the truth can be When there’s no help in truth.

Grief teaches the steadiest minds to waver.

By the Angel, it just crushed Sophocles," noted Will. "Has no one respect for the classics these days?

Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.

Alas, how terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the man that's wise! This I knew well, but had forgotten it, else I would not have come here.

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

The tyrant is a child of Pride Who drinks from his sickening cup Recklessness and vanity, Until from his high crest headlong He plummets to the dust of hope.

Leave me to my own absurdity.

Death is not the worst thing; rather, when one who craves death cannot attain even that wish.

No one loves the messenger who brings bad news.

One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.

I have been a stranger here in my own land: All my life

To Never Have been born may be the greatest boon of all

A city which belongs to just one man is no true city

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

Oblivion - what a blessing...for the mind to dwell a world away from pain.

The truth is what I cherish and that's my strength

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

Trust dies but mistrust blossoms.

Look and you will find it - what is unsought will go undetected.

The happiest life is to be without thought

It's terrible when the one who does the judging judges things all wrong.

Jem drew the bow back and let the arrow fly; it struck the creature in the side. The massive demon worm writhed in agony, undulating as it swept its great, blind head from side to side, uprooting shrubbery with its thrashings. Leaves filled the air and the boys choked on dust, Gideon backing up with his seraph blade in his hand, trying to see by its light. “It’s coming toward us,” he said in a low voice. And indeed it was, the arrow still protruding from its wet, grayish skin, humping its body along with incredible speed. A flick of its tail caught the edge of a statue, sending it flying into the dry ornamental pool, where it shattered into dust. “By the Angel, it just crushed Sophocles,” noted Will. “Has no one respect for the classics these days?

...count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.

How terrible-- to see the truth when the truth is only pain to him who sees!

There is no greater evil than men's failure to consult and to consider.

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

Children are the anchors that hold a mother to life.

Reading list (1972 edition)[edit] 1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus – Tragedies 4. Sophocles – Tragedies 5. Herodotus – Histories 6. Euripides – Tragedies 7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings 9. Aristophanes – Comedies 10. Plato – Dialogues 11. Aristotle – Works 12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus 13. Euclid – Elements 14. Archimedes – Works 15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections 16. Cicero – Works 17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil – Works 19. Horace – Works 20. Livy – History of Rome 21. Ovid – Works 22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia 23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic 25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion 26. Ptolemy – Almagest 27. Lucian – Works 28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus – The Enneads 32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine 33. The Song of Roland 34. The Nibelungenlied 35. The Saga of Burnt Njál 36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica 37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy 38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales 39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Thomas More – Utopia 44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises 45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion 47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays 48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies 49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene 51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis 52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays 53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences 54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World 55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals 56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan 57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy 58. John Milton – Works 59. Molière – Comedies 60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises 61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light 62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics 63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies 65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology 67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe 68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal 69. William Congreve – The Way of the World 70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge 71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man 72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws 73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary 74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones 75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

I ask this one thing: let me go mad in my own way.

Listen, Kafka. What you’re experiencing now is the motif of many Greek tragedies. Man doesn’t choose fate. Fate chooses man. That’s the basic worldview of Greek drama. And the sense of tragedy—according to Aristotle—comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist’s weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I’m getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex being a great example. Oedipus is drawn into tragedy not because of laziness or stupidity, but because of his courage and honesty. So an inevitable irony results.

No enemy is worse than bad advice.

I have no love for a friend who loves in words alone.

Wild as you are, all that love you must love you still.

All my care is you, and all my pleasure yours.

When he endures nothing but endless miseries-- What pleasure is there in living the day after day, Edging slowly back and forth toward death? Anyone who warms their heart with the glow Of flickering hope is worth nothing at all. The noble man should either live with honor or die with honor. That's all there is to be said.

Hide nothing, for time, which sees all and hears all, exposes all.

Unwanted favours gain no gratitude.

Which would you choose if you could: pleasure for yourself despite your friends or a share in their grief?

Wisdom outweighs any wealth.

Do not fear for me. Make straight your own path to destiny.

Do not believe that you alone can be right. The man who thinks that, The man who maintains that only he has the power To reason correctly, the gift to speak, the soul— A man like that, when you know him, turns out empty.

In time you will know this well: For time, and time alone, will show the just man, though scoundrels are discovered in a day.

Let every man in mankind's frailty consider his last day; and let none presume on his good fortune until he find Life, at his death, a memory without pain.

One learns by doing a thing; for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try.

Yes it will be a grace if I die. To exist is pain. Life is no desire of mine anymore.

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

Numberless are the world's wonders, but none more wonderful than man

Fate has terrible power. You cannot escape it by wealth or war. No fort will keep it out, no ships outrun it.

Truly, to tell lies is not honorable; but when the truth entails tremendous ruin, to speak dishonorably is pardonable.

Oh it's terrible when the one who does the judging judges things all wrong.

What greater wound is there than a false friend?

If you are out of trouble, watch for danger.

I have nothing but contempt for the kind of governor who is afraid, for whatever reason, to follow the course that he knows is best for the State.

The pain we inflict upon ourselves hurt most of all.

A soul that is kind and intends justice discovers more than any sophist

Not to be born at all Is best, far best that can befall, Next best, when born, with least delay To trace the backward way. For when youth passes with its giddy train, Troubles on troubles follow, toils on toils, Pain, pain forever pain; And none escapes life's coils. Envy, sedition, strife, Carnage and war, make up the tale of life.

Those who jump to conclusions may go wrong.

The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.

Never to have been born is best But if we must see the light, the next best Is quickly returning whence we came. When youth departs, with all its follies, Who does not stagger under evils? Who escapes them? Sophocles' Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, The best would be never to have been born at all. Heinrich Heine2

Do I not live? Badly, I know, but I live.

All men make mistakes.

To speak much is one thing; to speak to the point another!

Weep not, everything must have its day.

Of all vile things current on earth, none is so vile as money.

Success is dependent on effort.

For Time calls only once, and that determines all.

Whatever is sought for can be caught, you know, whatever is neglected slips away.

A lie never grows old.

Goodbye to the sun that shines for me no longer;

Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go. The sea-nymphs in the spray will be the chorus now. What’s left to say? Suspect too much sweet-talk but never close your mind. It was a fortunate wind that blew me here. I leave half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk and the half-true rhyme is love.

Reason is God's crowning gift to a man...

It is my nature to join in love, not hate.

It is the dead, not the living, who make the longest demands.

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

Not from Hades' black and universal lake can you lift him. Not by groaning, not by prayers. Yet you run yourself out in a grief with no cure, no time-limit, no measure. It is a knot no one can untie. Why are you so in love with things unbearable?

Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evil but if some god shakes your house ruin arrives ruin does not leave it comes tolling over the generations it comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floor and all your thrashed coasts groan

Take these things to heart, my son, I warn you. All men make mistakes, it is only human. But once the wrong is done, a man can turn his back on folly, misfortune too, if he tries to make amends, however low he's fallen, and stops his bullnecked ways. Stubbornness brands you for stupidity - pride is a crime.

THOMASINA: ....the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus! -- can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides -- thousands of poems -- Aristotle's own library!....How can we sleep for grief? SEPTIMUS: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

A precious mouldering pleasure 't is To meet an antique book, In just the dress his century wore; A privilege, I think, His venerable hand to take, And warming in our own, A passage back, or two, to make To times when he was young. His quaint opinions to inspect, His knowledge to unfold On what concerns our mutual mind. The literature of old; What interested scholars most, What competitions ran When Plato was a certainty, And Sophocles a man; When Sappho was a living girl, And Beatrice wore The gown that Dante deified. Facts, centuries before, He traverses familiar, As one should come to town And tell you all your dreams were true: He lived where dreams were born. His presence is enchantment, You beg him not to go; Old volumes shake their vellum heads And tantalize just so.

As a rule, we don't like to feel to sad or lonely or depressed. So why do we like music (or books or movies) that evoke in us those same negative emotions? Why do we choose to experience in art the very feelings we avoid in real life? Aristotle deals with a similar question in his analysis of tragedy. Tragedy, after all, is pretty gruesome. […] There's Sophocles's Oedipus, who blinds himself after learning that he has killed his father and slept with his mother. Why would anyone watch this stuff? Wouldn't it be sick to enjoy watching it? […] Tragedy's pleasure doesn't make us feel "good" in any straightforward sense. On the contrary, Aristotle says, the real goal of tragedy is to evoke pity and fear in the audience. Now, to speak of the pleasure of pity and fear is almost oxymoronic. But the point of bringing about these emotions is to achieve catharsis of them - a cleansing, a purification, a purging, or release. Catharsis is at the core of tragedy's appeal.

Numberless are the world's wonders, but none More wonderful than man; the storm gray sea Yields to his prows, the huge crests bear him high; Earth, holy and inexhaustible, is graven With shining furrows where his plows have gone Year after year, the timeless labor of stallions. The light-boned birds and beasts that cling to cover, The lithe fish lighting their reaches of dim water, All are taken, tamed in the net of his mind; The lion on the hill, the wild horse windy-maned, Resign to him; and his blunt yoke has broken The sultry shoulders of the mountain bull. Words also, and thought as rapid as air, He fashions to his good use; statecraft is his And his the skill that deflects the arrows of snow, The spears of winter rain: from every wind He has made himself secure--from all but one: In the late wind of death he cannot stand. O clear intelligence, force beyond all measure! O fate of man, working both good and evil! When the laws are kept, how proudly his city stands! When the laws are broken, what of his city then? Never may the anarchic man find rest at my hearth, Never be it said that my thoughts are his thoughts.