Quotes from Sophocles

Shame on the wight who when beset with ill Cares to live on in misery unrelieved.

I say you are the murderer you hunt.

Indeed, if the truth has any power.

To never have been born may be the greatest boon of all.

Therefore, while our eyes wait to see the destined final day, we must call no one happy who is of mortal race, until he has crossed life's border, free from pain.

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!

Say, can the mind be noble, where the stream Of gratitude is withered from the spring?

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.

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.

No, but I came by, Oedipus the ignorant

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.

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

I will screen my soul From reach of Pallas' grievous wrath.

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

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

I am not your slave. I serve Apollo.

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.

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

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

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

The happiest life consists of ignorance, Before you learn how to grieve or rejoice. --SOPHOCLES (496-406 B.C.)

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!