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Wellsprings
rhetoric

Kairos (The Opportune Moment)

καιρός

The decisive right moment — saying or doing the fitting thing at exactly the time it will land.

Kairos is the Greek feel for the opportune, critical moment and for fitting one's action to the circumstances, as opposed to abstract or timeless correctness. It was a watchword of the Sophists — Gorgias and Protagoras (5th c. BCE) — for whom persuasion meant matching the right words to the right occasion, and it is equally central in the Hippocratic medical writings, where the physician must seize the critical moment to act. It later shaped rhetoric, ethics, and even early Christian theology of the appointed time.

Where this idea shows up

11 Greek sources

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