“For love is the desire of the whole, and the pursuit of the whole is called love.”
- Source
- Symposium
- Date
- c. 385–370 BCE
- Attribution
- Source identified
- Voice / speaker
- Dialogue speaker · Aristophanes
- English wording
- Benjamin Jowett — Translator · from Ancient Greek
What does this quote mean?
Aristophanes presents love as a longing to recover wholeness, but the claim belongs to his deliberately mythic account of divided human beings rather than to a literal theory of human origins.
Where does it come from?
Symposium, Aristophanes’s speech, Benjamin Jowett translation, Project Gutenberg #1600. The sentence concludes the comic myth of humans split into halves; it is a speaker position inside Plato’s dialogue, not direct autobiography or anthropology by Plato.
Who voices the line?
Dialogue speaker · Aristophanes. Aristophanes gives the mythic speech in Symposium.
The source author and the local speaker can be different, especially in fiction, drama, dialogue and poetry.
How should this attribution be read?
This wording is connected with the named source shown above. Translations and editions can vary, so consult the source note when exact wording matters.