Quotes from Sophocles

Soon, soon you'll scream aloud—what haven won't reverberate?

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

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.

And a crowd of other horrors you'd never dream will level you with yourself and all your children.

The sea was the true center of the Greek world: "we live round the sea," says Plato's Socrates, "like frogs . . . around a pond.

No man will ever be rooted from the earth as brutally as you.

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

Brothers in old age, two of a kind, he and our guest here.

Reserved for the priest of Dionysus

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.

If I thought you would blurt out such absurdities, you'd have died waiting before I'd had you summoned.

This day will bring your birth and your destruction.

Yea, Oedipus, my sovereign lord and king

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

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

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

And whoever places a friend above the good of his own country, he is nothing.

The mind convicts itself in advance, when scoundrels are up to no good, plotting in the dark. Oh but I hate it more when a traitor, caught red-handed, tries to glorify his crimes.

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.

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

Are you quite finished? It's your turn to listen for just as long as you've ... instructed me. Hear me out, then judge me on the facts.

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

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

I don't know. And when I don't, I keep quiet.