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
One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life; that word is love.
—Sophocles
Topics: Romance, Pain, Love
Rather throw away that which is dearest to you, your own life, than turn away a good friend.
—Sophocles
All is disgust when one leaves his own nature and does things that misfit it.
—Sophocles
Topics: Being Ourselves
What fate can be worse than to know we have no one but ourselves to blame for our misfortunes.
—Sophocles
Topics: Self-reliance, Responsibility, Confidence
Truth is always the strongest argument.
—Sophocles
Topics: Truth
One who knows how to show and to accept kindness will be a friend better than any possession.
—Sophocles
Topics: Friendship, Kindness
To me so deep a silence portends some dread event; a clamorous sorrow wastes itself in sound.
—Sophocles
Topics: Silence
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
No enemy is worse than bad advice.
—Sophocles
Topics: Advice
But whoever gives birth to useless children, what would you say of him except that he has bred sorrows for himself, and furnishes laughter for his enemies.
—Sophocles
Everything is ideal to its parent.
—Sophocles
Topics: Family
Without labor nothing prospers.
—Sophocles
Topics: Work, Labor, One liners
How dangerous can false reasoning prove.
—Sophocles
Topics: Decisions
What you cannot enforce, do not command.
—Sophocles
Topics: Leadership, Leaders, Power
Profit is sweet, even if it comes from deception.
—Sophocles
Topics: Profit
You win the victory when you yield to friends.
—Sophocles
Topics: Friendship, Victory
The gods plant reason in mankind, of all good gifts the highest.
—Sophocles
Topics: Reason
There is no greater evil for men than the constraint of fortune.
—Sophocles
Topics: Fortune
If you have committed iniquity, you must expect to suffer; for vengeance with its sacred light shines upon you.
—Sophocles
Topics: Vengeance
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
Seize the hour.
—Sophocles
Topics: Time Management, Value of a Day
Opportunity has power over all things.
—Sophocles
Topics: Opportunities
To him who is in fear, everything rustles.
—Sophocles
Topics: Fear, One liners
Is anyone in all the world safe from unhappiness?
—Sophocles
Topics: Happiness, Unhappiness
Grief teaches the steadiest minds to waver.
—Sophocles
Topics: Grief
In a just cause the weak will beat the strong.
—Sophocles
Topics: Purpose
Children are the anchors that hold a mother to life
—Sophocles
Topics: Children
He who throws away a friend is as bad as he who throws away his life
—Sophocles
Heaven ne’er helps the man who will not act.
—Sophocles
Topics: Action, Acting, Act, Prayer, Heaven
It is a painful thing to look at your own trouble and know that you yourself, and no one else, has made it.
—Sophocles
Topics: Self-reliance, Responsibility, Confidence
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