Inspirational Quotes by Sophocles (Ancient Greek Dramatist)

Sophocles (c.496–c.406 BCE) was a Greek tragic dramatist. He is one of the trios of major Greek tragedians, with Aeschylus and Euripides.

Born in Colonus Hippius (now part of Athens,) Sophocles was the son of a wealthy merchant and enjoyed all the comforts of a thriving Greek empire. Sophocles was provided with the best traditional aristocratic education. He studied all of the arts and was very much at the center of Athenian public life; he served as an imperial treasurer and diplomat and was elected general twice. Sophocles’s long life embraced the most crucial epoch of Athenian history—from the defeat of the foreign threats in the Persian wars, through the ensuing economic and cultural expansion, to the years of decline. He died just ahead of the final defeat of Athens by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War.

Sophocles wrote 120 plays, of which seven survive, including Ajax, The Women of Trachis, Electra, and Philoctetes . The group known as the Theban plays—(Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone) have long been influential in English literature, either directly or in adaptations by Seneca, John Dryden, Nathaniel Lee, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Matthew Arnold, A. C. Swinburne, W. B. Yeats, and Ezra Pound.

Sophocles’s seven surviving plays are significant for their addition of a third actor to the previous two (plus the chorus.) This allowed a better complexity of plot and a much fuller depiction of the characters’ personalities.

At their essence, Sophocles’s tragedies are moral and religious dramas that pit the tragic hero against unalterable fate and the divine will of the gods. Human strength and achievement must be balanced by susceptibility to circumstance.

In his masterpiece Oedipus Rex, arguably the most influential play ever written, Oedipus is the model leader whose strengths and human fallibility set in motion the revelation that he has violated social and divine order through patricide and incest. The play dramatizes Oedipus’s heartbreaking journey toward self-understanding-exposing human nature and its implications.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Sophocles

A lie never lives to be old.
—Sophocles
Topics: Lies

It is only great souls that know how much glory there is in being good.
—Sophocles
Topics: Goodness

Without labor nothing prospers.
—Sophocles
Topics: Labor, One liners, Work

For those whose wit becomes the mother of villainy, those it educates to be evil in all things.
—Sophocles
Topics: Wit

For the dead there are no more toils.
—Sophocles
Topics: Dying, Death

In a just cause the weak will beat the strong.
—Sophocles
Topics: Purpose

Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man; the power that crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy wind, making a path under surges that threaten to engulf him…
—Sophocles
Topics: Knowledge, Wonder

Kindness begets kindness.
—Sophocles
Topics: Kindness

The long unmeasured pulse of time moves everything. There is nothing hidden that it cannot bring to light, nothing once known that may not become unknown.
—Sophocles
Topics: Knowledge

Knowledge must come through action; you can have no test which is not fanciful, save by trial.
—Sophocles
Topics: Knowledge

What you cannot enforce, do not command.
—Sophocles
Topics: Leadership, Leaders, Power

One learns by doing the thing; for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try.
—Sophocles
Topics: Ignorance

It is terrible to speak well and be wrong.
—Sophocles
Topics: Speaking, Speakers

Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.
—Sophocles
Topics: Failure, Success, Character, Honor, Honesty

Look and you will find it—what is unsought will go undetected.
—Sophocles
Topics: Possibilities, Potential

Dreadful is the mysterious power of fate; there is no deliverance from it by wealth or by war, by walled city or dark, seabeaten ships.
—Sophocles
Topics: Fate

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.
—Sophocles
Topics: Proverbs, Wisdom, Proverbial Wisdom

Success, remember is the reward of toil.
—Sophocles
Topics: Success & Failure, Success

Quick decisions are unsafe decisions.
—Sophocles
Topics: Decisions, Decision

Everything is ideal to its parent.
—Sophocles
Topics: Family

If i am young and wrong, then you are right. But if i am young, and right. What does my age matter?
—Sophocles

To him who is in fear, everything rustles.
—Sophocles
Topics: One liners, Fear

There is no witness so terrible and no accuser so powerful as conscience which dwells within us.
—Sophocles
Topics: Conscience

There is no witness so terrible-no accuser so powerful as conscience which dwells within us.
—Sophocles
Topics: Conscience

There is no sense in crying over spilt milk. Why bewail what is done and cannot be recalled?
—Sophocles
Topics: Forgiveness

Who feels no ills, should, therefore, fear them; and when fortune smiles, be doubly cautious, lest destruction come remorseless on him, and he fall unpitied.
—Sophocles
Topics: Prosperity, Success & Failure

The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
—Sophocles
Topics: Adversity

Grief teaches the steadiest minds to waver.
—Sophocles
Topics: Grief

If you have committed iniquity, you must expect to suffer; for vengeance with its sacred light shines upon you.
—Sophocles
Topics: Vengeance

Is anyone in all the world safe from unhappiness?
—Sophocles
Topics: Happiness, Unhappiness

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Inspirational Quotes by Sophocles (Ancient Greek Dramatist)

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