"Old age and the passage of time teach all things"
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Time is Sophocles' most unsentimental teacher: it doesn’t persuade, it grinds. “Old age and the passage of time teach all things” lands with the fatal calm of a playwright who has watched brilliance, piety, and power get corrected by consequences. The line isn’t motivational; it’s forensic. Knowledge arrives not as insight but as residue, what’s left after ambition has burned down and denial has run out of fuel.
The intent is double-edged. On one level, it elevates experience over theory: you can’t be argued into wisdom, you have to live into it. On another, it smuggles in a darker claim about human stubbornness. If time teaches “all things,” it’s because we refuse most lessons until reality makes them unavoidable. Old age becomes less a badge of honor than a record of survived errors.
In Sophocles’ cultural context, that rings with Greek ideas of pathei mathos - learning through suffering - and with the civic drama of Athens, where tragedies functioned as public thought experiments about responsibility, pride, and fate. His characters don’t change because someone gives a good speech; they change because the world closes in. That’s the subtext: persuasion is weak, time is strong.
Rhetorically, the sentence is bluntly totalizing - “all things” - a sweeping claim that feels earned precisely because it’s spoken from the far end of the story. It flatters no one. It offers comfort only in the most austere way: sooner or later, the truth will get through, even if it arrives with gray hair and a bill.
The intent is double-edged. On one level, it elevates experience over theory: you can’t be argued into wisdom, you have to live into it. On another, it smuggles in a darker claim about human stubbornness. If time teaches “all things,” it’s because we refuse most lessons until reality makes them unavoidable. Old age becomes less a badge of honor than a record of survived errors.
In Sophocles’ cultural context, that rings with Greek ideas of pathei mathos - learning through suffering - and with the civic drama of Athens, where tragedies functioned as public thought experiments about responsibility, pride, and fate. His characters don’t change because someone gives a good speech; they change because the world closes in. That’s the subtext: persuasion is weak, time is strong.
Rhetorically, the sentence is bluntly totalizing - “all things” - a sweeping claim that feels earned precisely because it’s spoken from the far end of the story. It flatters no one. It offers comfort only in the most austere way: sooner or later, the truth will get through, even if it arrives with gray hair and a bill.
Quote Details
| Topic | Aging |
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