Sophia

“In essence, love raises the feeling of one being for another to such a pitch that the threatened loss of the beloved or the loss of his love is felt no less keenly than the threat of death. Hence love is based on a
desire to live in anguish in the presence of an object of such high worth that the heart cannot bear to contemplate losing it. The fever of the senses is not a desire to die. Nor is love the desire to lose but the desire to live in fear of possible loss, with the beloved holding the lover on the very threshold of a swoon. At that price alone can we feel the violence of rapture before the beloved.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“I dream of a moment when, without my asking, my actions will betray completely this part of me that asks for nothing”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“A Spinoza in poetry becomes a Machiavelli in philosophy.

Mysticism is the scholastic of the heart, the dialectic of the feelings.

So long as our scholastic education takes us back to antiquity and furthers the study of the Greek and Latin languages, we may congratulate ourselves that these studies, so necessary for the higher culture, will never disappear.

If we set our gaze on antiquity and earnestly study it, in the desire to form ourselves thereon, we get the feeling as if it were only then that we really became men.


The pedagogue, in trying to write and speak Latin, has a higher and grander idea of himself than would be permissible in ordinary life.

If one has not read the newspapers for some months and then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature.
The classical is health; and the romantic, disease.

When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art.

For all other Arts we must make some allowance; but to Greek Art alone we are always debtors.

The dignity of Art appears perhaps most conspicuously in Music; for in Music there is no material to be deducted. It is wholly form and intrinsic value, and it raises and ennobles all that it expresses.

Art rests upon a kind of religious sense: it is deeply and ineradicably in earnest. Thus it is that Art so willingly goes hand in hand with Religion.

Art is essentially noble; therefore the artist has nothing to fear from a low or common subject. Nay, by taking it up, he ennobles it; and so it is that we see the greatest artists boldly exercising their sovereign rights.


Ignorant people raise questions which were answered by the wise thousands of years ago.

To praise a man is to put oneself on his level.

In science it is a service of the highest merit to seek out those fragmentary truths attained by the ancients, and to develop them further.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections

“Why did he not cry? He must have forgotten even that he had a voice.”
― Leonid Andreyev, Seven Who Were Hanged