Sophia

“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

“I felt that I was being ridiculous, and mortally injuring a kind man for ever in my madness—but what was friendship to me, what was my whole life compared with my impatience to feel the touch of your lips again, to hear you speak softly close to me? That is how I loved you. I loved you so much, and now that it is all over and done with I can tell you so. And I believe that if you summoned me from my deathbed I would suddenly find the strength in myself to get up and go with you.”
― Stefan Zweig, Letter from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories

“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

“She was frightened of him - his manner was severely cold and aloof...I have never seen anymore more exquisitely calm, more self-assured or more imperious.”
― Ivan Turgenev, First Love