Quotes from Sophocles

Creon: My voice is the one voice giving orders in this city! Haimon: It is no city if it takes orders from one voice. Creon: The State is the King! Haimon: Yes, if the State is a desert.

AGAMEMNÔN. Il n'est pas facile à un roi d'être pieux. ODYSSEUS. Mais les rois peuvent obéir aux amis qui les conseillent bien.

Stop—in the name of god, if you love your own life, call off this search! My suffering is enough.

Mortal man must always look to his ending. And none can be called happy until that day when he carries his happiness down to the grave in peace. - Sophocles

Tis hard for power to observe each pious rule.

Be warned my son, no man is free from error, but the wise and prudent man, When he has fallen into evil courses Does not persist but tries to find amendment It is the stubborn man who is the fool

I, I count myself the son of Chance, the great goddess, giver of all good things— I'll never see myself disgraced.

But death was a wind too strong for that.

If you are the man he says you are, believe me, you were born for pain.

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

For you have confused the upper and lower worlds. You have thrust the child of this world into living night, You have kept from the gods below the child that is theirs. The one on a grave before her death, the other, Dead, denied the grave. This is your crime.

does there exist, is there a man on earth who seizes more joy than just a dream, a vision?

But if these men are wrong, let them suffer nothing worse than they mete out to me— these masters of injustice!

And the vision no sooner dawns than dies blazing into oblivion.

You are my great example, you, your life your destiny, Oedipus, man of misery— I count no man blest.

But now to hear your story—is there a man more agonized? More wed to pain and frenzy? Not a man on earth, the joy of your life ground down to nothing

But now for all your power Time, all-seeing Time has dragged you to the light, judged your marriage monstrous from the start— the son and the father tangling, both one

Now I weep like a man who wails the dead and the dirge comes pouring forth with all my heart!

Well, I will start afresh and once again Make dark things clear.

I tell you the truth, you gave me life my breath leapt up in you and now you bring down night upon my eyes.

Walls, towers, and ships, they all are nothing with no men to keep the wall.

I tell you neither the waters of the Danube nor the Nile can wash this palace clean.

all done with a will. The pains we inflict upon ourselves hurt most of all.

KREON. Ich gehe, von dir verkannt, gerecht jedoch vor diesen.