Oedipus Quotes

“I got Oedipus off the incest charge--technicality, of course--he didn't know it was his mother at the time. ”
― Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots

“By God, I'll have more booty in a moment.”
― Sophocles, The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone

“OPIATE, n. An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the jail yard.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“We defend so cautiously against our egoically limited experiences, states Laing in The Politics of Experience, that it is not surprising to see people grow defensive and panic at the idea of experiencing ego-loss through the use of drugs or collective experiences. But there is nothing pathological about ego-loss, Laing adds; quite the contrary. Ego-loss is the experience of all mankind, "of the primal man, of Adam and perhaps even [a journey] further into the beings of animals, vegetables and minerals." No age, Laing concludes, has so lost touch with this healing process as has ours. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalytic approach serves to begin such a healing process. Its major task is to destroy the oedipalized and neuroticized individual dependencies through the forging of a collective subjectivity, a nonfascist subject—anti-Oedipus. Anti-Oedipus is an individual or a group that no longer functions in terms of beliefs and that comes to redeem mankind, as Nietzsche foresaw, not only from the ideals that weighed it down, "but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and antinihilist. . . He must come one day.—”
― Mark Seem, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“When things are at their worst,
there are no tears.”
― Seneca, Six Tragedies

“Truth often harms the one who digs it up.”
― Seneca, Six Tragedies

“In times of happiness, no point in shaking things up.
But in a time of crisis, the safest thing is change.”
― Seneca, Six Tragedies

“Ignorance is no cure for suffering.”
― Seneca, Six Tragedies

“The surest way for those who want to rule
is praising moderation, talking of peace and quiet.”
― Seneca, Six Tragedies

“Restless people often pretend to be calm.”
― Seneca, Six Tragedies

“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

“No delicate breeze brings comfort with icy breath of wind
to the hearts which pant on the flames.”
― Seneca, Six Tragedies

“I know that you are deathly sick; and yet, sick as you are, not one is as sick as I.”
― Sophocles

“Time alone can bring the just man to light - the criminal you can spot in just one short day.”
― Sophocles (trans. Robert Fagles), The Theban Plays

“Kings hate to hear the things they order spoken.”
― Seneca, Six Tragedies

“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

“A man through wit
May pass another’s wisdom in the race.”
― Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

“tis greater far To rule a people than a wilderness.”
― Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

“OEDIPUS: If all such violence goes with honor now
Why join the sacred dance.”
― Sophocles, Oedipus

“Like it or not, after Freud, no one had to read Sophocles to know something about Oedipus.”
― Paul Aron, Unsolved Mysteries of History: An Eye-Opening Investigation Into the Most Baffling Events of All Time

“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, Aha!

“...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, Fifth Business

“Oedipus gouges out his eyes, Jocasta hangs herself, both guiltless; the play has come to a harmonious conclusion. Wrote Schiller.”
― David Markson

“Aber wenn das menschliche Schuldgefühl auf die Tötung des Urvaters zurückgeht, das war doch ein Fall von 'Reue', und damals soll der Voraussetzung nach Gewissen und Schuldgefühl vor der Tat nicht bestanden haben? Woher kam in diesem Fall die Reue?”
― Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur

“Я имел подлость убить сегодня эту чайку. Кладу у ваших ног.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“So. I see where you're going—bus number 27 to a crossroads near Delphi. Look, I did not want, at any point, on any level, to kill my own father and sleep with my own mother. It's true that I wanted to sleep with Susan—and did so many times—and for a number of years thought of killing Gordon Macleod, but that is another part of the story. Not to put too fine a point on it, I think the Oedipus myth is precisely what it started off as: melodrama rather than psychology. In all my years of life I've never met anyone to whom it might apply.

You think I'm being naive? You wish to point out that human motivation is deviously buried, and hides its mysterious workings from those who blindly submit to it? Perhaps so. But even—especially—Oedipus didn't want to kill his father and sleep with his mother, did he? Oh yes he did! Oh no he didn't! Yes, let's just leave it as a pantomime exchange.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“What are the implacable values of Homer? Honor, status, personal courage—the values of an aristocratic military class? But this is not what the Iliad is about. It would be more correct to say, as Simone Weil does, that the Iliad—as pure an example of the tragic vision as one can find—is about the emptiness and arbitrariness of the world, the ultimate meaninglessness of all moral values, and the terrifying rule of death and inhuman force. If the fate of Oedipus was represented and experienced as tragic, it is not because he, or his audience, believed in “implacable values,” but precisely because a crisis had overtaken those values. It is not the implacability of “values” which is demonstrated by tragedy, but the implacability of the world. The story of Oedipus is tragic insofar as it exhibits the brute opaqueness of the world, the collision of subjective intention with objective fate. After all, in the deepest sense, Oedipus is innocent; he is wronged by the gods, as he himself says in Oedipus at Colonus. Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“How many ancient myths begin with the rescue of an abandoned child! If Polybus hadn't taken in the young Oedipus, Sophocles wouldn't have written his most beautiful tragedy!”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“I'd discovered how proud and fragile men could be, the sense of self that courses through their veins. I knew that fathers and sons were capable of killing each other. Whether it was father's killing their sons, or sons killing the fathers, men always emrged victorious , and all that was left for me to do was weep.”
― Orhan Pamuk, Kırmızı Saçlı Kadın

“Nicht durch seine Fehler, sondern durch seine Qualitäten wird der Mensch in die große Tragödie hineingezogen.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore