Greek Tragedy Quotes

Socrates didn't care to visit the theater, as a rule, except when the plays of Euripides (which some think, he himself had helped to compose), were performed.

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

To me Vivien Leigh was a tragic heroine of classic proportions: chosen, blessed and abandoned by the gods. Obstinately she tried to control and defy her destiny and to know her story is to be inspired by pity and terror.

Being somebody who's like a theater geek that I am, I can just go right back to Aeschylus and Euripides and Sophocles: they were writing about gods and goddesses versus humans, and how gods could distort, pervert, or help people get what they want.

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

I was 12 when it really hit me. I did children's theatre camp during the summers and played a fairy in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' The next summer, I played Clytemnestra in 'Agamemnon' and I was like, 'OK, this is amazing.'

Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy In sceptred pall come sweeping by, Presenting Thebes, or Pelops' line, Or the tale of Troy divine.

The situation in Greece just goes from bad to worse. We’ve now got a situation where there was the big suicide a few weeks ago, where a 77-year-old man shot himself in the head outside the Greek Parliament. That was the public face of what’s gone wrong.

Well, opera began with an intent to resuscitate Greek drama, that is, modern opera as we know it.

I studied classics, and I find it mystifying that we had Medea and Electra and Antigone and all these amazing characters, and they don't really exist in cinema now. The only person who's really doing it, and he gets loads of criticism for it, is Lars Von Trier.

... passion, once unleashed, has a way of unleashing other passions -- a principle adhered to as firmly by the police force of any large modern city as by the Greek tragedians.

My fatal flaw is hubris. The brown stuff they spread on veggie sandwiches? No, seaweed brain. That's hummus. Hubris is worse. What could be worse than hummus?

The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies.

Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the news, the stock-exchange reports, and the weather forecast are about the only things spared.

Any time the character is in a moral quandary is interesting. That's been true from the Greeks on down.

Theatricality - that's where you get catharsis. The Greeks went to see drama because they felt like this wasn't happening to them.

Greece was a muse. It inspired creativity in magical ways that I can't even begin to understand or explain.

You don't have to go to the kings and queens of the earth - I think the Greeks and Elizabethans did this because it was a logical concept - but every human being is in enormous conflict about something, even if it's how to get to work in the morning and all of that.

People try to make a Greek tragedy of my life, and they can't do it. I'm too happy.

Nothing is more theater-based than wrestling. It's Greek-tragedy-level theater.

I always have difficulty with the Greek tragic plays. I think the difficulty one has - which is a serious problem - is the question of belief. Do you believe in the myth that the play expresses? Do you believe in it as myth or as reality? With any play, you have to believe in it as reality. You can't act a myth.

If my life hadn't itself been a modern adaptation of 'Les Atrides,' I probably would never have left the theatre.

Most of the women in Greek tragedies have their fates predetermined. The gods dictate that such and such will happen to them, and everything they predict comes true. Not Medea.

The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.