The Oedipus Cycle Quotes

“A man’s anger can never age and fade away,
not until he dies. The dead alone feel no pain.”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“But surely they will shroud my corpse with Theban dust?”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“Never honor the gods in one breath
and take the gods for fools the next.”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“Acceptance—that is the great lesson suffering teaches,
suffering and the long years . . .”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“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.”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“Now as we keep our watch and wait the final day,
count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“What good were eyes to me?
Nothing I could see could bring me joy.”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“Oh how she wept, mourning the marriage-bed
where she let loose that double brood—monsters—
husband by her husband, children by her child.”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“How, how could the furrows your father plowed
bear you, your agony, harrowing on
in silence O so long?”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“O the generations of men92
the dying generations—adding the total
of all your lives I find they come to nothing”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“O god—
all come true, all burst to light!
O light—now let me look my last on you!”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“Brothers in old age, two of a kind,
he and our guest here.”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“A herdsman, were you? A vagabond, scraping for wages? MESSENGER: Your savior too, my son, in your worst hour.”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“I stumbled on you,
down the woody Hanks of Mount Cithaeron.”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“[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, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“It’s no city at all, owned by one man alone.”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“And if my present actions strike you as foolish,
let’s just say I’ve been accused of folly
by a fool.”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“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.”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“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.)”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“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.”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“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.”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“Reserved for the priest of Dionysus”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“The sea was the true center of the Greek world: “we live round the sea,” says Plato’s Socrates, “like frogs . . . around a pond.”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“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.”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“The Greeks, who gave us history, philosophy and political science, never managed to solve the problems posed by their political disunity;”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“Greece and Poverty,” said the historian Herodotus, “have always been bedfellows”;”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“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.”
― Sophocles, Sophocles I: The Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus

“And whoever places a friend
above the good of his own country, he is nothing:
I have no use for him. Zeus my witness,
Zeus who sees all things,”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“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.”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

“Who could behold his greatness without envy?”
― Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus