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

To me so deep a silence portends some dread event; a clamorous sorrow wastes itself in sound.
—Sophocles
Topics: Silence

A trifle is often pregnant with high importance; the prudent man neglects no circumstance.
—Sophocles
Topics: Life

Not to be born is, past all prizing, best.
—Sophocles

Best to live lightly, unthinkingly.
—Sophocles
Topics: Life and Living, Happiness

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

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

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

What fate can be worse than to know we have no one but ourselves to blame for our misfortunes.
—Sophocles
Topics: Self-reliance, Confidence, Responsibility

Rather throw away that which is dearest to you, your own life, than turn away a good friend.
—Sophocles

Better to die, and sleep
The never-waking sleep, than linger on
And dare to live when the soul’s life is gone.
—Sophocles
Topics: Suicide

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

There is no happiness where there is no wisdom;
No wisdom but in submission to the gods.
Big words are always punished,
And proud men in old age learn to be wise.
—Sophocles
Topics: Words

All is disgust when one leaves his own nature and does things that misfit it.
—Sophocles
Topics: Being Ourselves

Death is not the greatest of evils; it is worse to want to die, and not be able to
—Sophocles
Topics: Death

Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness.
—Sophocles
Topics: Wisdom

All a man’s affairs become diseased when he wishes to cure evils by evils.
—Sophocles
Topics: Wishes

Our happiness depends on wisdom all the way.
—Sophocles
Topics: Happiness, Wisdom

You win the victory when you yield to friends.
—Sophocles
Topics: Victory, Friendship

There is no greater evil for men than the constraint of fortune.
—Sophocles
Topics: Fortune

I well believe it, to unwilling ears;None love the messenger who brings bad news.
—Sophocles
Topics: News

To be doing good deeds is man’s most glorious task.
—Sophocles
Topics: Good Deeds, Goodness, Deeds

Silence gives the proper grace to women
—Sophocles
Topics: Grace

When a man has lost all happiness, he’s not alive. Call him a breathing corpse.
—Sophocles
Topics: Happiness

Truth is always the strongest argument.
—Sophocles
Topics: Truth

I would prefer even to fail with honor than win by cheating.
—Sophocles
Topics: Failure, Mistakes, Failures, Cheating

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

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

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

Opportunity has power over all things.
—Sophocles
Topics: Opportunities

To throw away an honest friend is, as it were, to throw your life away.
—Sophocles
Topics: Friendship

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Inspirational Quotes by Sophocles (Ancient Greek Dramatist)

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