Skip to content

Sophocles Quotes

497 BC–405 BC Greece

Sophocles (Greek: Σοφοκλῆς; c. 497/496 – winter 406/405 BC) was an ancient Greek tragedian known as one of three from whom at least two plays have survived in full. His first plays were written later than, or contemporary with, those of Aeschylus and earlier than, or contemporary with, those of Euripides.

Greece
Playwrights
Poets
Politicians

Also known as: Antigone, Oedipus rex

Random Sophocles quote

181 quotes

You do the deeds,
And your ungodly deeds find me the words.

My body is enslaved, my mind is free.

The tyrant is a child of Pride
Who drinks from his sickening cup
Recklessness and vanity,
Until from his high crest headlong
He plummets to the dust of hope.

Quick thinkers are not safe ones.

Henceforth ye may thieve with better knowledge whence lucre should be won, and learn that it is not well to love gain from every source. For thou wilt find that ill-gotten pelf brings more men to ruin than to weal.

For whoso lives, as I, in many woes,
How can it be but death shall bring him gain?

What may be taught I learn, what may be found
That I still seek for, what must come by prayer,
For that I asked the gods.

Your pain comes upon the individual, one by one, to each man alone and no other, but my soul groans for the city, for me and you together.

Love, ... who keepest thy vigil on the soft cheek of a maiden

Teiresias: How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be
When there's no help in truth!

Well, well, what greater joy could'st thou receive
Than touching land, and then, beneath a roof,
With slumbering mind to hear the pelting storm?

I will bury this my lance, this hateful thing,
Deep in some earth-hole where no eye shall see—
Night and Hell keep it in the underworld!

Time in its slow, illimitable course
Brings all to light and buries all again;
Strange things it brings to pass, the dreadest oath
Is broken and the stubbornest will is bent.

In such years is yon hapless one, not I alone: and as some cape that fronts the North is lashed on every side by the waves of winter, so he also is fiercely lashed evermore by the dread troubles that break on him like billows.

To call that man who prospers truly happy
Were vain before his life be wholly done;
For in short time and swift great power and riches
Have fallen by the dower of fate malign,
When fortune veers and thus the gods decree.

Yea, point thine arrow at a noble spirit, and thou shalt not miss; but should a man speak such things against me, he would win no faith. 'Tis on the powerful that envy creeps. Yet the small without the great can ill be trusted to guard the walls.

Love, unconquerable,
Waster of rich men, keeper
Of warm lights and all-night vigil
In the soft face of a girl:
Sea-wanderer, forest-visitor!
Even the pure immortals cannot escape you,
And mortal man, in his one day's dusk,
Trembles before your glory.

A lie never lives to be old.

The ideal condition
Would be, I admit, that men should be right by instinct;
But since we are all too likely to go astray,
The reasonable thing is to learn from those who can teach.

Look on Oedipus.
He solved the famous riddle, with his brilliance,
he rose to power, a man beyond all power.
Who could behold his greatness without envy?

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Sophocles (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.