system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
what did heraclitus mean by this qoute?

qoute“If you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it, for it is not to be reached by search or trail.''
gpt
It's pretty difficult to give clear interpretations of what Heraclitus meant in every fragment since they are provided without much context.

It contains within it the standard sort of paradoxical reasoning that Heraclitus usually employs - we can expect and encounter the unexpected, and yet we cannot search for it?  What on earth this means is a bit bewildering.  You might think, after all, that the unexpected is exactly the thing you can't expect, and this must be Heraclitus' more general point.  You can try to expect the unexpected *as such*, but unexpected as it is you can't go looking for it (by definition) in the particular.

(You might think that Heraclitus is drawing attention to a problem like the one Plato draws attention to in Meno - that seeking a thing requires, in some way, knowing a thing.)

This paradox of perception and knowledge may be part of the general theme in Heraclitus' work about the ways in which we have easy access to certain kinds of knowledge and yet are rather bad at understanding.