Member-only story
The Dangers of Quoting Out of Context
Be responsible with what you read — question it all
My spouse saw in an e-mail an image with a quote that said. “At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet,” and attributed the quote to Plato. As you can see from the above screen grab of a search I entered, the quote has become an oft-repeated meme.
My spouse forwarded the e-mail to me and asked, “would Plato say that?”
The quote is a nice sentiment, and it is a paraphrase of words that appear in one of Plato’s writings, the dialogue called “Symposium.” The problem is that Plato never believed it. This is why digging deeper is important.
Plato’s dialogues are fictional encounters. Plato’s characters in his dialogues were based on real people, but he puts words in the mouths of characters as a literary device to make larger philosophical points. Therefore, finding a quote in a Platonic dialogue doesn’t mean that it was ever said or that Plato agreed with it.
The quote about love and poetry is attributed to the character Agathon, in a fictional conversation with other people. Agathon was a real person, and he was a poet, but he probably never said what is seen in “Symposium,” and we don’t know if Agathon would have agreed with the words. Here are the actual words that appear in Plato’s…
