Arthur Miller
Playwright, Essayist
"The two greatest plays ever written were Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, and they're both about father-son relationships."
Oedipus quotes
Oedipus
25 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Sophocles
Playwright, Philosopher
"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."
Thomas Huxley
Biologist, Anthropologist
"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."
Sophocles
Playwright, Philosopher
"How terrible is wisdom, when it brings no profit to the man that's wise"
Joseph Campbell
Mythologist, Writer, Lecturer
"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."
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Oedipus quotes (page 1 of 2)
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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."
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"How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in truth!"
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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."
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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."
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"Plato did claim that the unexamined life was not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure."
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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."
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