In Sophocles's play Oedipus Rex, when Tiresias does speak, he speaks the truth. Why doesn’t Oedipus accept the story that Tiresias tells?

In Sophocles's play
Oedipus Rex, when Tiresias speaks, he speaks the truth. Why doesn't
Oedipus accept the story that Tiresias tells?

Various
answers to this question suggest themselves, including the
following:

• At first Oedipus suspects that
  Tiresias may be disloyal to Thebes (382-85).


• He also
  suspects Tiresias of disloyalty to himself (Oedipus;
  395).


• He accuses Tiresias of “stubbornness”
  (402).


• He accuses Tiresias of insulting Thebes
  (407).


• He even suspects Tiresias of having helped to plan
  Laius’s death:

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I get the feeling you conspired in the
act,
and played your part, as much as you could do,
short of killing
him with your own hands.
(413-15)

Given the fact that
Oedipus has already accused Tiresias of being unpatriotic, personally disloyal,
stubborn, disrespectful to Thebes, and partly responsible for the death of Laius, it is
not surprising that he is unwilling to believe Tiresias when the latter finally reveals
that Oedipus himself was the murderer of Laius. Tiresias several times accuses Oedipus
of having an uncontrolled temper (402-04; 409-10), and surely this temper also helps
explain why Oedipus rejects Tiresias’s revelations about Oedipus
himself.

Once Tiresias makes his personal revelations about
Oedipus, Oedipus repeats many of the same suspicions and charges he had already leveled
against the old man. He says, for instance,

• that
  Tiresias is a liar (445-46).


• that Tiresias has been
  bribed by Creon (464).


• that Tiresias is untalented
  (473-75)

During the course of his argument with
Tiresias, Oedipus reveals that he himself is arrogant, easy to angry, and greatly
irrational. These defects in his personality are some of the reasons he rejects the old
man’s revelations, but other reasons involve his assumptions that Tiresias himself is
afflicted with all the defects of character outlined above.  Ironically, Oedipus’s
suspicions about the alleged flaws in Tiresias’s character help reveal the flaws in
Oedipus himself.

-- Ian Johnston translation
(see link below).