Oedipus Quotes

• Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition. Let Othello subject Desdemona to a lie-detector test; his jealousy will still blind him to the evidence. Let Oedipus triumph over gravity; he won't triumph over his fate.

  Arthur Koestler

  Lying, Fate, Technology

  1953 'The Boredomof Fantasy', collected in The Trail of the Dinosaur (1955), pt.2.

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• Until now when we have started to talk about the uniqueness of America we have almost always ended by comparing ourselves to Europe. Toward her we have felt all the attraction and repulsions of Oedipus

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Country, Europe, America

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• Fear? What has a man to do with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day.

  Sophocles

  Fear, Men, Epic Poems

  Sophocles (1955). “The Theban Plays: King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus [and] Antigone”

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• How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in truth!

  Sophocles

  Knowledge, Ontology, Helping

  Sophocles (1977). “The Oedipus Cycle: An English Version”, Harcourt

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• How terrible is wisdom, when it brings no profit to the man that's wise

  Sophocles

  Wise, Men, He Man

  Sophocles (2013). “Sophocles I: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus”, p.85, University of Chicago Press

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• It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Faces, Philosopher, Clean

  Arthur Schopenhauer's letter to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, November 1819.

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• The two greatest plays ever written were Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, and they're both about father-son relationships.

  Arthur Miller

  Father, Son, Play

  Interview with William R. Ferris, www.neh.gov. March/April 2001.

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• 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

  Fire, Giving, Three

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• Plato did claim that the unexamined life was not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure.

  Tom Robbins

  Plato, Claims, Unexamined Life

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• 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

  Fashion, Men, Giving

  Gilles Deleuze, FeÌl?ix Guattari (2004). “Anti-Oedipus”, p.118, A&C Black

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• Samoa culture demonstrates how much the tragic or the easy solution of the Oedipus situation depends upon the inter-relationship between parents and children, and is not created out of whole cloth by the young child's biological impulses.

  Margaret Mead

  Children, Science, Parent

  Margaret Mead (1975). “Male and female: a study of the sexes in a changing world”, William Morrow & Co

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• To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, "I wish I had known this some time ago.

  Roger Zelazny

  Guy, Wish, Hindsight

  Roger Zelazny (1978*). “Sign of the unicorn. The hand of Oberon. The Courts of Chaos”

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• I never know who's influencing me at any time. I mean, I can take a play by Brecht and adapt it, I'm consciously adapting that play, or, as I've done with the Greek classics, Euripides and Oedipus, and I'm consciously adapting that play. Whether it influences me or not, I think it's the critics, the analysts who have to decide that. Me, I don't feel that I'm under the influence of any such sources.

  Wole Soyinka

  Mean, Thinking, Play

  Source: www.nobelprize.org

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• 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

  Father, Law, Hatred

  Roland Barthes (2012). “How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces”, p.190, Columbia University Press

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• 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

  Hero, Character, Modern Novel

  "The art of creating a legend" by Umberto Eco, www.theguardian.com. July 19, 2002.

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• Ignorance is bliss. Oedipus ruined a great sex life by asking too many questions.

  Stephen Colbert

  Sex, Ignorance, Asking

  TV Series "The Colbert Report" (Season 2, 2006), 2005–2015.

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• ‎"As Oedipus learned, the more you run away from what is predetermined the more you run toward it.

  M.J. Rose

  Running, Running Away, Predetermined

  M. J. Rose (2015). “The Reincarnationist”, p.95, MIRA

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• The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Light, Romance

  "The Hero with a Thousand Faces". Book by Joseph Campbell, 1949.

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• 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

  Fall, Emotional, Understanding

  Source: collider.com

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• 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

  Fashion, Writing, Names

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I pity the young woman who will attempt to insinuate herself between my mama's boy and me. I sympathize with the monumental nature of her task. It will take a crowbar, two bulldozers and half a dozen Molotov cocktails to pry my Oedipus and me loose from one another.

  Ayelet Waldman

  Boys, Molotov Cocktail, Two

  Ayelet Waldman (2009). “Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace”, p.88, Anchor

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• 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

  Real, Views, Political

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• 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

  Mother, Father, Giving

  Sigmund Freud (2018). “The Ego and the Id”, p.23, Courier Dover Publications

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• 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

  Husband, Actors, World

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• What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason — instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods.

  David Simon

  Selfish, People, Guy

  "Stealing Life" by Margaret Talbot, www.newyorker.com. October 22, 2007.

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