For time approaching, and time hereafter, And time forgotten, one rule stands: That greatness never Shall touch the life of man without destruction.

From The Greeks and the Irrational by E.R. Dodds.  He is quoting his translation of two choruses from the end of Antigone by Sophocles.  Emphasis added

Blessed is he whose life has not tasted of evil. 

When God has shaken a house, the winds of madness 

Lash its breed till the breed is done:   

Even so the deep-sea swell   

Raked by wicked Thracian winds 

Scours in its running the subaqueous darkness, 

Churns the silt black from sea-bottom; 

And the windy cliffs roar as they take its shock. 

Here on the Labdacid house long we watched it piling, 

Trouble on dead men's trouble: no generation 

Frees the next from the stroke of God:  

Deliverance does not come. 

The final branch of Oedipus 

Grew in his house, and a lightness hung above it: 

To-day they reap it with Death's red sickle, 

The unwise mouth and the tempter who sits in the brain. 

The power of God man's arrogance shall not limit: 

Sleep who takes all in his net takes not this, 

Nor the unflagging months of Heaven—ageless the Master 

Holds for ever the shimmering courts of Olympus.   

For time approaching, and time hereafter,   

And time forgotten, one rule stands:   

That greatness never 

Shall touch the life of man without destruction.  

 

Hope goes fast and far: to many it carries comfort, 

To many it is but the trick of light-witted desire— 

Blind we walk, till the unseen flame has trapped our footsteps. 

For old anonymous wisdom has left us a saying  

"Of a mind that God leads to destruction   

The sign is this—that in the end    

Its good is evil." 

Not long shall that mind evade destruction.