Oedipus Quotes

Collection of famous quotes and sayings about Oedipus.

Quotes About Oedipus

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One Jewish lady was talking to the neighbor, and she said, "The psychoanalyst who is treating my son has said that my son suffers from an Oedipus complex." And the neighbor lady said, "Oedipus schmoedipus! Doesn't matter as long as he is a good boy and loves his mother! ~ Osho
Oedipus quotes by Osho
How dreadful the knowledge of the truth can be
When there's no help in truth. ~ Sophocles
Oedipus quotes by Sophocles
The character and the play of Hamlet are central to any discussion of Shakespeare's work. Hamlet has been described as melancholic and neurotic, as having an Oedipus complex, as being a failure and indecisive, as well as being a hero, and a perfect Renaissance prince. These judgements serve perhaps only to show how many interpretations of one character may be put forward. 'To be or not to be' is the centre of Hamlet's questioning. Reasons not to go on living outnumber reasons for living. But he goes on living, until he completes his revenge for his father's murder, and becomes 'most royal', the true 'Prince of Denmark' (which is the play's subtitle), in many ways the perfection of Renaissance man.
Hamlet's progress is a 'struggle of becoming' - of coming to terms with life, and learning to accept it, with all its drawbacks and challenges. He discusses the problems he faces directly with the audience, in a series of seven soliloquies - of which 'To be or not to be' is the fourth and central one. These seven steps, from the zero-point of a desire not to live, to complete awareness and acceptance (as he says, 'the readiness is all'), give a structure to the play, making the progress all the more tragic, as Hamlet reaches his aim, the perfection of his life, only to die. ~ Ronald Carter
Oedipus quotes by Ronald Carter
Closer,
it's all right. Touch the man of grief.
Do. Don't be afraid. My troubles are mine
and I am the only man alive who can sustain them. ~ Sophocles
Oedipus quotes by Sophocles
One of the truths about suicide is that it's hardly ever about the future. It's the past the suicide can't face, and although disgrace appears to be the exception, the one instance where suicide seems to be about the future, even in Oedipus, it's her past Jocasta can't accept, once it's come to light. ~ Charles D'Ambrosio
Oedipus quotes by Charles D'Ambrosio
To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, I wish I had known this some time ago. ~ Roger Zelazny
Oedipus quotes by Roger Zelazny
Psychoanalysts are bent on producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture. It is Oedipus who produces man in this fashion and who gives a structure to the false movement of infinite progression and regression ~ Gilles Deleuze
Oedipus quotes by Gilles Deleuze
Plato did claim that the unexamined life was not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure. ~ Tom Robbins
Oedipus quotes by Tom Robbins
MARSYAS: Beware!
Easily trips the big word "dare."
Each man's an Œdipus, that thinks
He hath the four powers of the Sphinx,
Will, Courage, Knowledge, Silence. Son,
Even the adepts scarce win to one!
The Thoughts - they fall like rotten fruits.
But to destroy the power that makes
These thoughts - thy Self? A man it takes
To tear his soul up by the roots!
This is the mandrake fable, boy! ~ Aleister Crowley
Oedipus quotes by Aleister Crowley
As Oedipus learned, the more you run away from what is predetermined the more you run toward it. ~ M.J. Rose
Oedipus quotes by M.J. Rose
In the last book of the Iliad (24.602ff.), Achilles urges Priam to eat: even Niobe, he says, after all her children had been slaughtered by the gods, took food eventually. Both Priam and Achilles have been bereaved of their dearest, and yet they gather themselves, and eat, and sleep, and go on living. (...) ...there are two early Lucanian vases with mourners by a grave stele with the same inscription "spoken" by the tomb: "On my back I grow mallow and thick-rooted asphodel: / in my bosom I hold Oedipus, son of Laios." Even Oedipus, the great king of Thebes, archetype of tragedy, experienced a catastrophic fall and descended into the deepest pit of horrors; yet ordinary plants grow on his tomb. We are not so different. ~ Oliver Taplin
Oedipus quotes by Oliver Taplin
Give me a life wherever there is an opportunity to live, and better life than was my father's. ~ Sophocles
Oedipus quotes by Sophocles
Only a philosopher would consider taking Oedipus as a model for a normal, unproblematic relation between an action and the maxim of the act. ~ Jerry A. Fodor
Oedipus quotes by Jerry A. Fodor
Time alone can bring the just man to light - the criminal you can spot in just one short day. ~ Sophocles
Oedipus quotes by Sophocles
The population question is the real riddle of the sphinx, to which no political Oedipus has as yet found the answer. In view of the ravages of the terrible monster over-multiplication, all other riddle sink into insignificance. ~ Thomas Huxley
Oedipus quotes by Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Yorgos Seferis
Oedipus quotes by Yorgos Seferis
What creature goes on four feet in the morning, on two at noonday, on three in the evening?

Man. In childhood he creeps on hands and feet; in manhood he walks erect; in old age he helps himself with a staff. ~ Oedipus
Oedipus quotes by Oedipus
Parnet: I want you to talk about desire. What is desire, exactly? Let's consider the question as simply as possible. When Anti-Oedipus...

Deleuze: It's not what they thought it was, in any case, not what they thought it was, even back then. Even, I mean, the most charming people who were... It was a big ambiguity, it was a big misunderstanding, or rather a little one, a little misunderstanding. I believe that we wanted to say something very simple. In fact, we had an enormous ambition, notably when one writes a book, we thought that we would say something new, specifically that one way or another, people who wrote before us didn't understand what desire meant. That is, in undertaking our task as philosophers, we were hoping to propose a new concept of desire. But, regarding concepts, people who don't do philosophy mustn't think that they are so abstract... On the contrary, they refer to things that are extremely simple, extremely concrete, we'll see this later... There are no philosophical concepts that do not refer to non-philosophical coordinates. It's very simple, very concrete. What we wanted to express was the simplest thing in the world. We wanted to say: up until now, you speak abstractly about desire because you extract an object that's presumed to be the object of your desire. So, one could say, I desire a woman, I desire to leave on a trip, I desire this, that. And we were saying something really very simple, simple, simple: You never desire someone or so ~ Gilles Deleuze
Oedipus quotes by Gilles Deleuze
But I can cite ten other reasons for not being a father."
"First of all, I don't like motherhood," said Jakub, and he broke off pensively. "Our century has already unmasked all myths. Childhood has long ceased to be an age of innocence. Freud discovered infant sexuality and told us all about Oedipus. Only Jocasta remains untouchable; no one dares tear off her veil. Motherhood is the last and greatest taboo, the one that harbors the most grievous curse. There is no stronger bond than the one that shackles mother to child. This bond cripples the child's soul forever and prepares for the mother, when her son has grown up, the most cruel of all the griefs of love. I say that motherhood is a curse, and I refuse to contribute to it."
"Another reason I don't want to add to the number of mothers," said Jakub with some embarrassment, "is that I love the female body, and I am disgusted by the thought of my beloved's breast becoming a milk-bag."
"The doctor here will certainly confirm that physicians and nurses treat women hospitalized after an aborted pregnancy more harshly than those who have given birth, and show some contempt toward them even though they themselves will, at least once in their lives, need a similar operation. But for them it's a reflex stronger than any kind of thought, because the cult of procreation is an imperative of nature. That's why it's useless to look for the slightest rational argument in natalist propaganda. Do you perhaps think it's the vo ~ Milan Kundera
Oedipus quotes by Milan Kundera
The myth of Oedipus . . . arouses powerful intellectual and emotional reactions in the adult-so much so, that it may provide a cathartic experience, as Aristotle taught all tragedy does. [A reader] may wonder why he is so deeply moved; and in responding to what he observes as his emotional reaction, ruminating about the mythical events and what these mean to him, a person may come to clarify his thoughts and feelings. With this, certain inner tensions which are the consequence of events long past may be relieved; previously unconscious material can then enter one's awareness and become accessible for conscious working through. This can happen if the observer is deeply moved emotionally by the myth, and at the sametime strongly motivated intellectually to understand it. ~ Bruno Bettelheim
Oedipus quotes by Bruno Bettelheim
I remember the first time I read Freud, I was 25 or 30, and I was expecting it to be about the Oedipus complex. But what I actually discovered confirmed my own common experience, that you also had little boys who loved their fathers and little girls who loved their mothers. ~ Arnaud Desplechin
Oedipus quotes by Arnaud Desplechin
By the time Sami entered high school Mustafa had grudgingly accepted that the boy needed to know something of the patriarchs. For the sake of Sami's secular education he gulped back his discomfort. These Semitic myths, after all, were essential to the literary traditions Sami would study. So Mustafa delivered his interpretation of religious pre-history. He explained that, as with Oedipus or Achilles, there was psychopathic drama in the lives of the heroes, a drama in its essence no different from that of today's Speakers' Corner soapbox types, or of the schizophrenics following mysterious itineraries through the city's streets. The scriptural heroes heard the same internal mumblings and insinuations, but as they belonged to an epic age, with epic genres, these were granted mythic status. It was pre-psychological, pre-ironic. There was high seriousness everywhere, blowing out of the desert and rolling up from the sea. There was prophetic articulation of destiny. There was the terror of God's voice. ~ Robin Yassin-Kassab
Oedipus quotes by Robin Yassin-Kassab
THE RAW MATERIAL of a myth, like the raw material of a dream, may be something that actually happened once. But myths, like dreams, do not tell us much about that kind of actuality. The creation of man, Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, Oedipus - they do not tell us primarily about events. They tell us about ourselves. In popular usage, a myth has come to mean a story that is not true. Historically speaking that may well be so. Humanly speaking, a myth is a story that is always true. ~ Frederick Buechner
Oedipus quotes by Frederick Buechner
At the time I was first writing the stories/essays that appear in Oedipus Wrecked, I was still under the impression that people would be delighted to see their name in print. I overlooked the fact that I was writing about intimate matters, and people are a bit touchy about airing their private lives in such a public fashion. Especially when it's done without their consent. ~ Kevin Keck
Oedipus quotes by Kevin Keck
so that it isn't upsetting to anybody. It's something we've always known about fairy tales – they talk about incest, the Oedipus complex, about psychotic mothers, like those of Snow White and Hansel and Gretel, who throw their children out. They tell things about life which children know instinctively, and the pleasure and relief lie in finding these things expressed in language that children can live with. You can't eradicate these feelings – they exist and they're a great source of creative inspiration. ~ Maurice Sendak
Oedipus quotes by Maurice Sendak
Oedipus had to abandon his certainty, his clarity, and supposed insight in order to become aware of the dark ambiguity of the human condition. ~ Karen Armstrong
Oedipus quotes by Karen Armstrong
...What was wrong between Diana and me was that she was too much a mother to me, and as I had had one mother, and lost her, I was not in a hurry to acquire another--not even a young and beautiful one with whom I could play Oedipus to both our hearts' content. If I could manage it, I had no intention of being anybody's own dear laddie, ever again. ~ Robertson Davies
Oedipus quotes by Robertson Davies
Beggar: There was a time when we didn't exist, Oedipus. That means that even the deepest desires of our heart, our blood, our moments of awakening have sprung from nothing. Even your desire to escape destiny is perhaps destiny. It isn't we who made our own blood. It's enough to feel it and live like free man, as the oracle bids us.
Oedipus: Yes, so long as a man is still searching. You had the luck never to reach your goal. But the day comes when you go back to Cithaeron, you forget everything and the mountain seems to bring back your childhood. You look at it day after day and maybe you climb it. Then someone tells you that you were born up there. And everything crumbles. ~ Cesare Pavese
Oedipus quotes by Cesare Pavese
Every time one can write a self-deluded song, you are way ahead of the game, way ahead. Self-delusion is the basis of nearly all the great scenes in all the great plays, from 'Oedipus' to 'Hamlet.' ~ Stephen Sondheim
Oedipus quotes by Stephen Sondheim
generally, we refuse to admit within ourselves, within our friends, the fullness of that self-protective, carnivorous fever which is the nature of the organic cell. Rather, we tend to perfume, reinterpret; meanwhile, imagining that all the flies in the ointment are the faults of some unpleasant someone else.
But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to attention, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organ of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, becomes intolerable to the pure pure pure soul. The innocent delight of oedipus in his first possession of the queen turns to an agony of spirit when he learns who the woman is. ~ Joseph Campbell
Oedipus quotes by Joseph Campbell
Truth often harms the one who digs it up. ~ Seneca.
Oedipus quotes by Seneca.
The sexual wishes in regard to the mother become more intense and the father is perceived as an obstacle to the; this gives rise to the Oedipus complex. ~ Sigmund Freud
Oedipus quotes by Sigmund Freud
How terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle
Oedipus quotes by Arthur Conan Doyle
The two greatest plays ever written were Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, and they're both about father-son relationships. ~ Arthur Miller
Oedipus quotes by Arthur Miller
To expend oneself, to bestir oneself for an impenetrable object is pure religion. To make the other into an insoluble riddle on which my life depends is to consecrate the other as a god; I shall never manage to solve the question the other asks me, the lover is not Oedipus. Then all that is left for me to do is to reverse my ignorance into truth. ~ Roland Barthes
Oedipus quotes by Roland Barthes
I know that you are deathly sick; and yet, sick as you are, not one is as sick as I. ~ Sophocles
Oedipus quotes by Sophocles
By God, I'll have more booty in a moment. ~ Sophocles
Oedipus quotes by Sophocles
Modern man's dependency on the love partner, then, is a result of the loss of spiritual ideologies, just as is his dependency on his parents or on his psychotherapist. He needs somebody, some "individual ideology of justification" to replace the declining "collective ideologies." Sexuality, which Freud thought was at the heart of the Oedipus complex, is now understood for what it really is: another twisting and turning, a groping for the meaning of one's life. If you don't have a God in heaven, an invisible dimension that justifies the visible one, then you take what is nearest at hand and work out your problems on that. ~ Ernest Becker
Oedipus quotes by Ernest Becker
The surest way for those who want to rule
is praising moderation, talking of peace and quiet. ~ Seneca.
Oedipus quotes by Seneca.
Throughout history, human nature remains unchanged. The world's oldest questions are still being asked. Medea, Oedipus, we're not adding anything that the Greeks didn't already know. ~ Christopher Fowler
Oedipus quotes by Christopher Fowler
Besides, it is doubtful that incest was a real obstacle to the establishment of society, as the partisans of an exchangist conception claim ... The real danger is elsewhere. If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire ... is capable of calling into question the established order of society ... it is revolutionary in its essence ... It is therefore of vital importance for a society to repress desire, and even to find something more efficient than repression, so that repression, hierarchy, exploitation, and servitude are themselves desired ... that does not at all mean that desire is something other than sexuality, but that sexuality and love do not live in the bedroom of Oedipus, they dream instead of wide-open spaces, and ... do not let themselves be stocked within an established order. ~ Gilles Deleuze
Oedipus quotes by Gilles Deleuze
Long, long ago; her thought was of that child
By him begot, the son by whom the sire
Was murdered and the mother left to breed
With her own seed, a monstrous progeny.
Then she bewailed the marriage bed whereon
Poor wretch, she had conceived a double brood,
Husband by husband, children by her child. ~ Sophocles
Oedipus quotes by Sophocles
What's the good of glory, magnificent renown, if in its flow it steams away to nothing? ~ Oedipus
Oedipus quotes by Oedipus
Blameless as daylight I stood looking
At a field of horses, necks bent, manes blown,
Tails streaming against the green
Backdrop of sycamores. Sun was striking
White chapel pinnacles over the roofs,
Holding the horses, the clouds, the leaves

Steadily rooted though they were all flowing
Away to the left like reeds in a sea
When the splinter flew in and stuck my eye,
Needling it dark. Then I was seeing
A melding of shapes in a hot rain:
Horses warped on the altering green,

Outlandish as double-humped camels or unicorns,
Grazing at the margins of a bad monochrome,
Beasts of oasis, a better time.
Abrading my lid, the small grain burns:
Red cinder around which I myself,
Horses, planets and spires revolve.

Neither tears nor the easing flush
Of eyebaths can unseat the speck:
It sticks, and it has stuck a week.
I wear the present itch for flesh,
Blind to what will be and what was.
I dream that I am Oedipus.

What I want back is what I was
Before the bed, before the knife,
Before the brooch-pin and the salve
Fixed me in this parenthesis;
Horses fluent in the wind,
A place, a time gone out of mind."
"The Eye-Mote ~ Sylvia Plath
Oedipus quotes by Sylvia Plath
Restless people often pretend to be calm. ~ Seneca.
Oedipus quotes by Seneca.
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. ~ Mary Rose O'Reilley
Oedipus quotes by Mary Rose O'Reilley
This pursuit of unavailable distant people has oedipal roots.
… fearing the consequences, they make certain that they fail at the attempt."
―Distancing, Kantor (p.115) ~ Kantor
Oedipus quotes by Kantor
In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called "The Aetiology of Hysteria." However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest.
Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the "Oedipus complex," which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women's and children's reports of mistreatment by men.
Once abuse was denied in this way, the st ~ Lundy Bancroft
Oedipus quotes by Lundy Bancroft
The great discovery of psychoanalysis was that of the production of desire, of the production of the unconscious. But once Oedipus entered the picture, the discovery was soon buried beneath the new brand of idealism: a classical theater was substituted for the unconscious as a factory: representation was substituted for the units of production of the unconscious; and an unconscious that was capable of nothing but expressing itself – in myth, tragedy, dreams – was substituted for the productive unconscious ~ Gilles Deleuze
Oedipus quotes by Gilles Deleuze
Kings hate to hear the things they order spoken. ~ Seneca.
Oedipus quotes by Seneca.
Thou lov'st to speak in riddles and dark words. ~ Sophocles
Oedipus quotes by Sophocles
No delicate breeze brings comfort with icy breath of wind
to the hearts which pant on the flames. ~ Seneca.
Oedipus quotes by Seneca.
I thought of my mother ( ... ). Freud wrote that no man is secure in the love of his mother can ever be a failure. Well, I had been busy proving that theory wrong. ~ Scott Spencer
Oedipus quotes by Scott Spencer
Oedipus Rex vs. Tyrannosaurus Rex
Oedipus Rex, a tragedy by Sophocles, chronicles the story of Oedipus, a man who becomes the king of Thebes while in the process unwittingly fulfilling a prophecy that he would murder his pops Laius and marry his mom Jocasta.

Tyrannosaurus Rex , commonly abbreviated to T. Rex, was a big fucking dinosaur that kicked ass during the Jurassic period.

My point?

My point is there doesn't have to be a point if you have
already hooked the reader with a catchy title.

And the winner is...
Steven Spielberg ~ Beryl Dov
Oedipus quotes by Beryl Dov
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. ~ Bob Dylan
Oedipus quotes by Bob Dylan
Ignorance is bliss-Oedipus ruined a great sex life by asking too many questions. ~ Stephen Colbert
Oedipus quotes by Stephen Colbert
I have attempted to tear asunder the veil you have hung to conceal from us the pain of life, and I have been wounded by the mystery ... Oedipus, half way to finding the word of the enigma, young Faust, regretting already the simple life, the life of the heart, I come back to you repentant, reconciled, O gentle deceiver! ~ Joseph Conrad
Oedipus quotes by Joseph Conrad
When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle conceived Sherlock Holmes, why didn't he give the famous consulting detective a few more quirks: a wooden leg, say, and an Oedipus complex? Well, Holmes didn't need many physical tics or personality disorders; the very concept of a consulting detective was still fresh and original in 1887. ~ Christopher Fowler
Oedipus quotes by Christopher Fowler
Many audiences all over the world will answer positively from their own experience that they have seen the face of the invisible through an experience on the stage that transcended their experience in life. They will maintain that Oedipus or Berenice or Hamlet or The Three Sisters performed with beauty and with love fires the spirit and gives them a reminder that daily drabness is not necessarily all. ~ Peter Brook
Oedipus quotes by Peter Brook
Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state. ~ Umberto Eco
Oedipus quotes by Umberto Eco
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 hearth
I 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. ~ Sophocles
Oedipus quotes by Sophocles
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. ~ Sophocles
Oedipus quotes by Sophocles
Then there're Theseus, Oedipus, Peleus, Orpheus, Jason and Hercules all waiting to be untangled, since their various deeds are running crisscross through my mind like multicolored threads in a dress. Myron ~ Anne Frank
Oedipus quotes by Anne Frank
Someday you will murder your father and be with your mother, he said." Once I've spoken this, put this thought into concrete words, a hollow feeling grabs hold of me. And inside that hollow, my heart pounds out a vacant, metallic rhythm. Expression unchanged, Oshima gazes at me for a long time. "So he said that someday you would kill your father with your own hands, that you would sleep with your mother." I nod a few more times. "The same prophecy made about Oedipus. Though of course you knew that." I nod. "But that's not all. There's an extra ingredient he threw into the mix. I have a sister six years older than me, and my father said I would sleep with her, too." "Your father actually said this to you?" "Yeah. I was still in elementary school then, and didn't know what he meant by 'be with.' It was only a few years later that I caught on." Oshima doesn't say anything. "My father told me there was nothing I could do to escape this fate. That prophecy is like a timing device buried inside my genes, and nothing can ever change it. I will kill my father and be with my mother and sister. ~ Haruki Murakami
Oedipus quotes by Haruki Murakami
What you cannot enforce, do not command! ~ Sophocles
Oedipus quotes by Sophocles
Ignorance is no cure for suffering. ~ Seneca.
Oedipus quotes by Seneca.
Oedipus gouges out his eyes, Jocasta hangs herself, both guiltless; the play has come to a harmonious conclusion. Wrote Schiller. ~ David Markson
Oedipus quotes by David Markson
My husband, who's the greatest actor in the world, can do anything. Look at what he did in The Critic and Oedipus. In every role he gets-he did this in Richard the Third-there's nothing he can't do, nothing. Just nothing. ~ Vivien Leigh
Oedipus quotes by Vivien Leigh
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. ~ David Mamet
Oedipus quotes by David Mamet
For if there are no waving flags and marching songs at the barricades as Walter marches out with his little battalion, it is not because the battle lacks nobility. On the contrary, he has picked up in his way, still imperfect and wobbly in his small view of human destiny, what I believe Arthur Miller once called "the golden threat of history." He becomes, in spite of those who are too intrigued with despair and hatred of man to see it, King Oedipus refusing to tear out his eyes, but attacking the Oracle instead. He is that last Jewish patriot manning his rifle at Warsaw; he is that young girl who swam into sharks to save a friend a few weeks ago; he is Anne Frank, still believing in people; he is the nine small heroes of Little Rock; he is Michelangelo creating David and Beethoven bursting forth with the Ninth Symphony. He is all those things because he has finally reached out in his tiny moment and caught that sweet essence which is human dignity, and it shines like the old star-touched dream that it is in his eyes. ~ Lorraine Hansberry
Oedipus quotes by Lorraine Hansberry
Listen, Kafka. What you're experiencing now is the motif of many Greek tragedies. Man doesn't choose fate. Fate chooses man. That's the basic worldview of Greek drama. And the sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. Sophocles' Oedipus Rex being a great example. Oedipus is drawn into tragedy not because of laziness or stupidity, but because of his courage and honesty. So an inevitable irony results. ~ Haruki Murakami
Oedipus quotes by Haruki Murakami
To translate man back into nature, to become master over the many vain and overly enthusiastic interpretations and connotations that have so far been scrawled and painted over that eternal basic text of homo natura; to see to it that the human being henceforth stands before human beings as even today, hardened in the discipline of science, he stands before the rest of nature, with intrepid Oedipus eyes and sealed Odysseus ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical bird catchers who have been piping at him all too long, "you are more, you are higher, you are of a different origin" - that may be a strange and insane task, but it is a task - who would deny that? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Oedipus quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche
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. ~ Reduced Shakespeare Company
Oedipus quotes by Reduced Shakespeare Company
I keep coming back to it, over and over - adultery and cheating. It's the most interesting problem in the theater. How else do you get Oedipus? That's the first cheating in the theater. ~ Mike Nichols
Oedipus quotes by Mike Nichols
I like violence because I like looking at it and I like understanding emotional and physical violence and how they work with one another ... It's operating in all these levels of hopefully - Oedipus is one of my favorite stories, that's like falling down a well when you read that - so that would be the hope, that each thing causes the next. ~ Kimberly Peirce
Oedipus quotes by Kimberly Peirce
The critical task of schizoanalysis, then, is to destroy the power of representation in all its many forms, including the Oedipus complex, the ego, religious and ethnic fanaticisms, patriotism, the debt to capital, and so on; the aim is to expunge belief from the unconscious altogether, to undo molar recoding as much as possible. ~ Eugene W. Holland
Oedipus quotes by Eugene W. Holland
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. ~ Roman Payne
Oedipus quotes by Roman Payne
It is not in words that I should wish my life to be distinguished, but rather in things done. ~ Sophocles
Oedipus quotes by Sophocles
You, you'll see no more the pain I suffered, all the pain I caused! Too long you looked on the ones you never should have seen, blind to the ones you longed to see, to know! Blind from this hour on! Blind in the darkness-blind! ~ Sophocles
Oedipus quotes by Sophocles
The tragic fear and pity may be aroused by the Spectacle; but they may also be aroused by the very structure and incidents of the play - which is the better way and shows the better poet. The Plot in fact should be so framed that even without seeing the things take place, he who simply hears the account of them shall be filled with horror and pity at the incidents; which is just the effect that the mere recital of the story in Oedipus would have on one. To produce this same effect by means of the Spectacle is less artistic, and requires extraneous aid. ~ Aristotle.
Oedipus quotes by Aristotle.
Chorus:
'man after man after man
o mortal generations
here once
almost not here
what are we
dust ghosts images a rustling of air
nothing nothing
we breathe on the abyss
we are the abyss
our happiness no more than traces of a dream
the high noon sun sinking into the sea
the red spume of its wake raining behind it
we are you
we are you Oedipus
dragging your maimed foot
in agony
and now that I see your life finally revealed
your life fused with the god
blazing out of the black nothingness of all we know
I say
no happiness lasts nothing human lasts ~ Sophocles
Oedipus quotes by Sophocles
Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred? ~ Roland Barthes
Oedipus quotes by Roland Barthes
In times of happiness, no point in shaking things up.
But in a time of crisis, the safest thing is change. ~ Seneca.
Oedipus quotes by Seneca.
It is not by means of a metaphor that a banking or stock-market transaction, a claim, a coupon, a credit, is able to arouse people who are not necessarily bankers. And what about the effects of money that grows, money that produces more money? There are socioeconomic "complexes" that are also veritable complexes of the unconscious, and that communicate a voluptuous wave from the top to the bottom of their hierarchy (the military-industrial complex). And ideology, Oedipus, and the phallus have nothing to do with this, because they depend on it rather than being its impetus. For it is a matter of flows, of stocks, of breaks in and fluctuations of flows; desire is present wherever something flows and runs, carrying along with it interested subjects - but also drunken or slumbering subjects - toward lethal destinations. ~ Gilles Deleuze
Oedipus quotes by Gilles Deleuze
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