Oedipus Quotes

On this page you will find all the quotes on the topic "Oedipus". There are currently 3 quotes in our collection about Oedipus. Discover the TOP 10 sayings about Oedipus!
The best sayings about Oedipus that you can share on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and other social networks!
  • 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

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

    Father   Son   Oedipus  
    Interview with William R. Ferris, www.neh.gov. March/April 2001.
  • It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher.

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

    Real   Oedipus   Views  
  • It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles' Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable inquiry even though he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry with us the Jocasta in our hearts, who begs Oedipus, for God's sake, not to inquire further.

    Philosophy   Heart   Fate  
    Letter to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, November 1819.
  • 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.

  • 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.

    "Stealing Life" by Margaret Talbot, www.newyorker.com. October 22, 2007.
  • How terrible is wisdom, when it brings no profit to the man that's wise

    Wise   Men   Oedipus  
    Sophocles (2013). “Sophocles I: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus”, p.85, University of Chicago Press
  • To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, "I wish I had known this some time ago.

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

    Fashion   Men   Oedipus  
    Gilles Deleuze, FeÌl?ix Guattari (2004). “Anti-Oedipus”, p.118, A&C Black
  • I got Oedipus off the incest charge--technicality, of course--he didn't know it was his mother at the time.

    Jasper Fforde (2004). “The Well of Lost Plots: A Thursday Next Novel”, p.47, Penguin
  • 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.

    "The Hero with a Thousand Faces". Book by Joseph Campbell, 1949.
  • ‎"As Oedipus learned, the more you run away from what is predetermined the more you run toward it.

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

    Mean   Thinking   Play  
    Source: www.nobelprize.org
  • 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?

    Father   Oedipus   Law  
    Roland Barthes (2012). “How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces”, p.190, Columbia University Press
  • I was not interested in doing the plot of Oedipus in blackface. I did wonder, what would these people have been like if they hadn't been in that situation?... One could look at Oedipus, or at my character Augustus, as a cynical schemer who did everything because he was hungry for power. But that's just too easy. I'm more interested in how humans can embody conflicting goals and emotions.

    "The darker face of the earth". American Theatre, November 1, 1996.
  • 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.

    Mother   Father   Oedipus  
    Sigmund Freud (2018). “The Ego and the Id”, p.23, Courier Dover Publications
  • Ignorance is bliss. Oedipus ruined a great sex life by asking too many questions.

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

    Fear   Men   Oedipus  
    Sophocles (1955). “The Theban Plays: King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus [and] Antigone”
  • Plato did claim that the unexamined life was not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure.

    Plato   Oedipus   Claims  
  • 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 (1975). “Male and female: a study of the sexes in a changing world”, William Morrow & Co
  • 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.

    Source: therumpus.net
  • 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.

    "The art of creating a legend" by Umberto Eco, www.theguardian.com. July 19, 2002.
  • How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in truth!

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

    Source: collider.com
  • 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.

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

    Lying   Fate   Technology  
    1953 'The Boredomof Fantasy', collected in The Trail of the Dinosaur (1955), pt.2.
Page of
We hope our collection of Oedipus quotes has inspired you! Our collection of sayings about Oedipus is constantly growing (today it includes 3 sayings from famous people about Oedipus), visit us more often and find new quotes from famous authors!
Share our collection of quotes on social networks – this will allow as many people as possible to find inspiring quotes about Oedipus!