Quotes from Sophocles

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?

Long, long ago; her thought was of that child By him begot, the son by whom the sire Was murdered and the mother left to breed With her own seed, a monstrous progeny. Then she bewailed the marriage bed whereon Poor wretch, she had conceived a double brood, Husband by husband, children by her child.

To me so deep a silence portends some dread event; a clamorous sorrow wastes itself in sound.

You are a woman marked for sorrow.

CHORUS: You that live in my ancestral Thebes, behold this Oedipus,- him who knew the famous riddles and was a man most masterful; not a citizen who did not look with envy on his lot- see him now and see the breakers of misfortune swallow him! Look upon that last day always. Count no mortal happy till he has passed the final limit of his life secure from pain.

What is God singing in his profound Delphi of gold and shadow?

ELECTRA: Oh but my love—now that you have travelled back down all those years to meet my heart, over all this grief of mine, do not oh love— ORESTES: What are you asking? ELECTRA: Do not turn your face from me. Don't take yourself away.

One soul is enough, I know, to pay the debt for thousands, if one will go to the gods in all good faith.

Nothing great enters the life of mortals without a curse.

And if to some my tale seems foolishness I am content that such could count me fool.

Friendship is a tension. It makes delicate demands.

The working of the mind discover oft Dark deeds in darkness schemed, before the act. More hateful still the miscreant who seeks When caught, to make a virtue of a crime.

A friend in word is never friend of mine.

he came to know the god intimately and the strange mad flower of his mind dripped in the dark

Shall not I Learn place and wisdom? Have I not learned this, Only so much to hate my enemy, As though he might again become my friend, And so much good to wish to do my friend, As knowing he may yet become my foe?

All concerns of men go wrong when they wish to cure evil with evil.

But when a god sends harm, no man can sidestep it, no matter how strong he may be.

To be doing good deeds is man's most glorious task.

TEIRESIAS: You have your eyes but see not where you are in sin, nor where you live, nor whom you live with. Do you know who your parents are? Unknowing you are enemy to kith and kin in death, beneath the earth, and in this life.

Man's worst ill is stubbornness of heart.

Neoptolemus: I am glad to see you and take you as a friend. For one who knows how to show and accept kindness will be a better friend than any possession.

It's little I ask, and get still less, but quite enough for me.

You'll never find a man on Earth, if a god leads him on, who can escape his fate.

The dead alone feel no pain.