Oedipus Quotes

1. "Truth was the last thing on my mind, and even if there was such a thing, I didn't want it in my house. Oedipus went looking for the truth and when he found it, it ruined him. It was a cruel horror of a joke. So much for the truth. I was gonna talk out of both sides of my mouth and what you heard depended on which side you were standing. If I ever did stumble on any truth, I was gonna sit on it and keep it down."
Author: Bob Dylan

2. "As a rule, we don't like to feel to sad or lonely or depressed. So why do we like music (or books or movies) that evoke in us those same negative emotions? Why do we choose to experience in art the very feelings we avoid in real life?Aristotle deals with a similar question in his analysis of tragedy. Tragedy, after all, is pretty gruesome. […] There's Sophocles's Oedipus, who blinds himself after learning that he has killed his father and slept with his mother. Why would anyone watch this stuff? Wouldn't it be sick to enjoy watching it? […] Tragedy's pleasure doesn't make us feel "good" in any straightforward sense. On the contrary, Aristotle says, the real goal of tragedy is to evoke pity and fear in the audience. Now, to speak of the pleasure of pity and fear is almost oxymoronic. But the point of bringing about these emotions is to achieve catharsis of them - a cleansing, a purification, a purging, or release. Catharsis is at the core of tragedy's appeal."
Author: Brandon W. Forbes

3. "The basis of drama is ... is the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realizes that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilization and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable. The example Aristotle uses, of course, is Oedipus."
Author: David Mamet

4. "This may not be art as art commonly goes; the lack of discipline, of control, would seem to rule it out of that category. And yet Woolrich's lack of control over emotions is a crucial element in his work, not only because it intensifies the fragility and momentariness of love but also because it tears away the comfortable belief, evident in some of the greatest works of the human imagination such as Oedipus Rex, that nobility in the face of nothingness is possible. And if Woolrich's work is not art as commonly understood, there is an art beyond art, whose form is not the novel or story but the scream; and of this art Woolrich is beyond doubt a master. ("Introduction")"
Author: Francis M. Nevins

5. "Of us is the Oedipus here? Which the Sphinx? It would seem to be a rendezvous of questions and notes of interrogation. And could it be believed that it at last seems to us as if the problem had never been propounded before, as if we were the first to discern it, get a sight of it, and RISK RAISING it? For there is risk in raising it, perhaps there is no greater risk."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

6. "I agree with Proust in this, he says, that books create their own silences in ways that friends rarely do. And the silence that grows palpable when one has finished a canto of Dante, he says, is quite different from the silence that grows palpable when one has reached the end of Oedipus at Colonus. The most terrible thing that has happened to people today, he says, is that they have grown frightened of silence. Instead of seeking it as a friend and as a source of renewal they now try in every way they can to shut it out... the fear of silence is the fear of loneliness, he says, and the fear of loneliness is the fear of silence. People fear silence, he says, because they have lost the ability to trust the world to bring about renewal. Silence for them means only the recognition that they have been abandoned... How can people find the strength to be happy if they are so terrified of silence?"
Author: Gabriel Josipovici

7. "In our gradually shrinking world, everyone is in need of all the others. We must look for man wherever we can find him. When on his way to Thebes Oedipus encountered the Sphinx, his answer to its riddle was: «Man». That simple word destroyed the monster. We have many monsters to destroy. Let us think of the answer of Oedipus."
Author: George Seferis

8. "Aye Oedipus, yir a complex fucker right enough"
Author: Irvine Welsh

9. "I got Oedipus off the incest charge--technicality, of course--he didn't know it was his mother at the time."
Author: Jasper Fforde

10. "Only a philosopher would consider taking Oedipus as a model for a normal, unproblematic relation between an action and the maxim of the act."
Author: Jerry A. Fodor

11. "The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change."
Author: Joseph Campbell

12. "?"As Oedipus learned, the more you run away from what is predetermined the more you run toward it."
Author: M.J. Rose

13. "Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still had a lot of energy for this student-oriented part of the job. Rather, it was _books_ that no longer interested me, drama and fiction in particular. It was as though a priest, in midcareer, had come to doubt the reality of transubstantiation. I could still engage with poems and expository prose, but most fiction seemed the product of extremities I no longer wished to visit. So many years of Zen training had reiterated, 'Don't get lost in the drama of life,' and here I had to stand around in a classroom defending Oedipus."
Author: Mary Rose O'Reilley

14. "We have no idea any more what it means to feel guilty. The communists have the excuse that Stalin misled them, murdurers have the excuse that their mothers didn't love them. And suddenly you come out and say: there is no excuse. No one could be more innocent in his soul and conscience than Oedipus, and yet he punished himself when he saw what he had done."
Author: Milan Kundera

15. "Wisdom not only comes with suffering: when it comes, it is radically unusable. (Brooks' comment on the Oedipus tragedy)"
Author: Peter Brooks

16. "Today's theater-goer must live in dread of walking into a theater and discovering that some classic work has been given a modernized, socially relevant setting. Oedipus gouges his eyes with a spoon at a 1950's malt shop; Macbeth napalms Banquo in Viet Nam, Julius Caesar dies in Dallas in 1963. More and more, American theater is coming to resemble a season of Quantum Leap."
Author: Reduced Shakespeare Company

17. "To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, "I wish I had known this some time ago."
Author: Roger Zelazny

18. "The novelist is condemned to wander all his life. Homeless and blind like Oedipus he wanders until death. And so let us protect the novelist and adore him, with pity, honor, and love."
Author: Roman Payne

19. "Pemudanya mencari sosok ibu, oedipus complex. Perempuannya mencari sosok kekanakan yang mungkin hilang dari masa kecilnya"
Author: Sinta Yudisia

20. "OEDIPUS:O, O, O, they will all come,all come out clearly! Light of the sun, let melook upon you no more after today!I who first saw the light bred of a matchaccursed, and accursed in my livingwith them I lived with, cursed in my killing."
Author: Sophocles

21. "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."
Author: Sophocles

22. "OEDIPUS: Upon the murderer I invoke this curse-whether he is one man and all unknown, or one of many- may he wear out his life in misery to miserable doom! If with my knowledge he lives at my hearthI pray that I myself may feel my curse. On you I lay my charge to fulfill all this for me, for the God, and for this land of ours destroyed and blighted, by the God forsaken."
Author: Sophocles

23. "Terror"There is something About youThat seems so youngSo trustingThis is the part of you that I most love And the part of you that I am most frightened to hurt Do you think the German poetsWhen speaking of the terror of loveMeant the terror that comes From knowingWe can be harmed Or from knowingWe have the power to hurtOf these two terrorsThe second is the greaterHumanity's deeper fear Perhaps it is so Even with Americans Who arm their leaders Not for fear of being destroyed But because in disarming them for a momentAll the harm done would be exposed Leaving the people Limping home in shameLike OedipusWho was haunted by mirrorsThe terror that comesFrom knowing you have the power to hurtThis is the greater fearPerhaps this is why our dogsCan look into our eyes UnflinchinglyWith unconditional loveIt is not because they are too stupid to know that somedayWe may casually break their heartsBut because they are wise enough to know thatThey will never break ours"
Author: Tara Sophia Bahna James

24. "Plato did claim that the unexamined life was not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure."
Author: Tom Robbins

Oedipus Quotes Pictures