"πῶς," ἔφη, "ὦ Σοφόκλεις, ἔχεις πρὸς τἀφροδίσια; ἔτι οἷός τε εἶ γυναικὶ συγγίγνεσθαι"; καὶ ὅς, "εὐφήμει," ἔφη, "ὦ ἄνθρωπε: ἁσμενέστατα μέντοι αὐτὸ ἀπέφυγον, ὥσπερ λυττῶντά τινα καὶ ἄγριον δεσπότην ἀποδράς."

"Heaven ne'er helps the men who will not act."

"If it were possible to heal sorrow by weeping and to raise the dead with tears, gold were less prized than grief."

"War loves to seek its victims in the young."

"It is better not to live at all than to live disgraced."

"Do nothing secretly; for Time sees and hears all things, and discloses all."

"Truly, to tell lies is not honorable; But when the truth entails tremendous ruin, To speak dishonorably is pardonable."

"A short saying often contains much wisdom."

"Death is not the worst evil, but rather when we wish to die and cannot."

"No man loves life like him that's growing old."

"A lie never lives to be old."

"When ice appears out of doors, and boys seize it up while it is solid, at first they experience new pleasures. But in the end their pride will not agree to let it go, but their acquisition is not good for them if it stays in their hands. In the same way an identical desire drives lovers to act and not to act."

"The Philoctetes is a most noble play; conspicuous even among the works of Sophocles for the grace and majesty of effect produced by the most simple means. There is more character in it than in any play in the Greek language; two or three of Euripides's best excepted."

"I have been less pleased with this perusal of the Œdipus Tyrannus than I was when I read it in January; perhaps because I then read it all at one sitting. The construction seems to me less perfect than I formerly thought it. But nothing can exceed the skill with which the discovery is managed. The agony of Œdipus is so unutterably grand; and the tender sorrow, in which his mind at last reposes after his daughters have been brought to him, is as moving as anything in the Greek Drama."

"The first part of the Ajax is prodigiously fine. I do not know that the agonies of wounded honour have ever been so sublimely represented... But the interest of the piece dies with Ajax. In the debates which follow, Sophocles does not succeed as well as Euripides would have done. The odes, too, are not very good."

"... Sophocles, the poet loved and feared, Whose mighty voice once called out of her lair The Dorian muse severe, with braided hair, Who loved the thyrsus and wild dances weird."

"Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand. Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in. Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea."

"Be his My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul From first youth tested up to extreme old age Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole; The mellow glory of the Attic stage, Singer of sweet Colonus, and its child."

"ὁ δ’εὔκολος μὲν ἐνθάδ’, εὔκολος δ’ἐκεῖ"