"It is best to live however one can be"
About this Quote
The line urges a sober allegiance to life itself. It does not promise triumph or purity; it acknowledges limits, chance, and pain, yet still counsels endurance. To live, even under constraint, is a good that precedes other goods. Without life there is no deliberation, no repair, no reversal, no renewed attempt at justice or joy. The phrase however one can be strips away heroic ornament and asks for a simple, stubborn persistence.
Sophocles often stages this conflict between survival and an ideal of honor that can slide into self-cancellation. Ajax chooses death rather than bear humiliation. Antigone embraces a noble demise rather than compromise. Yet other voices in these dramas argue for adaptability. Odysseus, especially in Philoctetes, praises resourcefulness and the preservative power of life; the chorus frequently urges patience. The saying aligns with those pragmatic currents, pushing back against the seductive purity of absolute gestures. It asserts that being-alive is the condition of agency, and even fractured agency is preferable to none.
The phrase also shades into a meditation on fate. Human beings, in Sophocles, are not sovereign; the gods, luck, and inherited guilt deform choices. However one can be acknowledges that our control is partial. The task is to find dignity inside constraint, to sustain a self that is buffeted by what it cannot master. Endurance becomes a moral achievement, not mere passivity.
Yet the playwright never reduces life to mere breath. Time and again he shows the cost of living at any price: Creon survives his rigidity only to dwell in ruin; Neoptolemus learns that survival requires truth as well as cunning. The sentence does not sanctify cowardice or opportunism. It places a thumb on the scale for life while leaving intact the tragic demand to live well. Between resignation and defiance, it opts for a clear-eyed tenacity: accept the world as it is, take what is given, and keep going, so that possibility remains.
Sophocles often stages this conflict between survival and an ideal of honor that can slide into self-cancellation. Ajax chooses death rather than bear humiliation. Antigone embraces a noble demise rather than compromise. Yet other voices in these dramas argue for adaptability. Odysseus, especially in Philoctetes, praises resourcefulness and the preservative power of life; the chorus frequently urges patience. The saying aligns with those pragmatic currents, pushing back against the seductive purity of absolute gestures. It asserts that being-alive is the condition of agency, and even fractured agency is preferable to none.
The phrase also shades into a meditation on fate. Human beings, in Sophocles, are not sovereign; the gods, luck, and inherited guilt deform choices. However one can be acknowledges that our control is partial. The task is to find dignity inside constraint, to sustain a self that is buffeted by what it cannot master. Endurance becomes a moral achievement, not mere passivity.
Yet the playwright never reduces life to mere breath. Time and again he shows the cost of living at any price: Creon survives his rigidity only to dwell in ruin; Neoptolemus learns that survival requires truth as well as cunning. The sentence does not sanctify cowardice or opportunism. It places a thumb on the scale for life while leaving intact the tragic demand to live well. Between resignation and defiance, it opts for a clear-eyed tenacity: accept the world as it is, take what is given, and keep going, so that possibility remains.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|
More Quotes by Sophocles
Add to List
