John Addington Symonds > Quotes

“The world has suffered no greater literary loss than the loss of Sappho's poems.”
― John Addington Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets

“To see the sun shining on its bright grass, fresh, when we first visited it, with the autumnal dews, and hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the sun-warm earth, and to mark the tombs, mostly of women and young people who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep.”
― John Addington Symonds, Percy Bysshe Shelley

“The agony of this struggle between self-yielding to desire and love, and self-scourging by a trained discipline of analytic reflection, breaks his nerve. The only exit for a soul thus plagued is suicide.”
― John Addington Symonds

“No seed shall perish which the soul hath sown.”
― John Addington Symonds

“incorporated what he chose”
― John Addington Symonds, The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti