Life & Wisdom Quote by Sophocles

Disgust is the moral alarm Sophocles trusts most: not a squeamish reaction to dirt, but the body’s verdict when a person steps outside the limits of what they are. “Leaves his own nature” doesn’t flatter the modern idea of self-invention; it warns that there’s a shape to human life, a set of fitting actions, and that violating it doesn’t merely cause harm - it contaminates the whole world of feeling. “All is disgust” is totalizing on purpose. Once the breach happens, the stain spreads: relationships, rituals, even language take on the sour taste of something out of joint.

In Greek tragedy, this isn’t self-help advice about authenticity. It’s a civic and religious claim. Sophocles writes in a culture where the polis runs on boundaries: between citizen and exile, human and divine, permissible pride and hubris. To do “what is unfit” is to violate to prepon - what is appropriate - and that appropriateness is not personal preference but a public grammar. Disgust functions as the chorus’s emotional shorthand for pollution (miasma), the sense that a wrong act doesn’t stay private; it radiates.

The subtext is a warning about self-justification. Tragic figures rarely think they’re villains; they think they’re exceptions. Sophocles punctures that fantasy by treating moral transgression as self-betrayal: the punishment begins internally, as revulsion. The line’s sting is its refusal to negotiate. Once you abandon your nature, the world stops feeling like home - and that queasy recognition is the first, clearest form of judgment.