Have you noticed that many quotes attributed to famous people are actually incorrect? When someone sends me one of these fancy quotes of profound wisdom, it looks really suspicious to me if:
- It’s a picture (as in, not text in a technical sense)
- It’s attributed to someone famous
- There’s a picture of that person
- There’s no source
When I start looking into it, I usually end up reading a quote investigator article that says the original line was written a few hundred of years ago, got mutated many times along the way, and eventually was coupled with the name of someone like Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein or whatever.
BTW I put that picture together using Imgflip’s meme generator. Seemed appropriate.
You picked a great picture to illustrate this - it’s from The School of Athens by Raphael and not only does your crop depict Plato, to whom quotes are often misattributed, but Raphael was thought to have modeled him on Leonardo da Vinci, who also crops up a lot in these contexts.
Incidentally, today someone sent me a quote misattributed to Socrates, which then pushed me down a rabbit hole. Somewhere along the way, I bumped into The School of Athens, and here we are.