Life & Wisdom Quote by Sophocles

Sophocles needles the most flattering human delusion: that information is the same thing as foresight. The line grants “seeing” its due - people learn by watching, experience accumulates, patterns emerge - then yanks away the comfort we smuggle in afterward, the belief that those patterns add up to certainty. In Greek tragedy, sight is never just optics; it’s a moral and intellectual posture. “Men may know” sets up a modest, almost empirical confidence, only to be undercut by the hard boundary between knowledge and prophecy.

The subtext is a critique of mastery. Even the prophet, the figure culturally licensed to claim tomorrow, cannot see “before the event.” That’s not a cheap gotcha about fallible fortune-tellers; it’s a structural claim about human life as lived forward. Sophocles is writing for a society that consults oracles and treats fate as legible, yet his plays repeatedly show how prediction curdles into misinterpretation. The tragedy isn’t ignorance; it’s partial knowledge weaponized into overconfidence.

The second clause lands like a verdict: “nor what end waits for him.” It’s personal, not abstract. You can read the world all day and still miss the plot arc you’re inside. That’s Sophoclean irony in miniature: characters act with reasons that make sense locally, then discover those actions were also steps toward a destination they never chose. The sentence works because it refuses the modern fantasy of control while also mocking the ancient fantasy of divine access. Everyone is stuck with hindsight dressed up as insight.