Life & Wisdom Quote by Sophocles

Attention is the ancient engine of fate in Sophocles: what you refuse to see will still destroy you, and what you lazily assume will remain invisible. "Look and you will find it" sounds like simple encouragement, but the dash turns it into a warning. This isn't a pep talk about curiosity; it's a diagnosis of how humans collaborate with their own blindness. The line implies that reality doesn't announce itself. Truth requires pursuit, and neglect has consequences.

In Sophoclean drama, that subtext hits like a trapdoor. His characters are rarely defeated by a lack of information; they're defeated by the wrong relationship to information. Oedipus interrogates, yes, but he also resists the implications of what he's uncovering until the evidence becomes unbearable. Creon clings to civic order so tightly he cannot "look" at the human cost until the bodies pile up. The gods may set the board, but the catastrophe arrives through selective perception, pride, and the comforting habit of not asking the next question.

The second clause sharpens the moral edge: "what is unsought will go undetected". Sophocles is describing an ethic of inquiry. If you don't actively search - if you don't examine motives, test stories, confront inconvenient facts - you will live inside a curated illusion, and you will call it peace. The line survives because it names a familiar modern failure mode: we mistake passivity for neutrality. Sophocles insists it's a choice, and it's never a harmless one.