Eros seizes and shakes my very soul like the wind on the mountain _x000D_ shaking ancient oaks.
SapphoRead
Beauty endures only for as long as it can be seen; goodness, beautiful today, will remain so tomorrow.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Beauty is fleeting, but goodness is enduring and timeless.
This quote by Sappho emphasizes the transient nature of physical beauty as opposed to the lasting quality of goodness. While beauty may capture our attention and admiration, it is goodness—characterized by moral integrity and virtue—that holds enduring value and significance, continuing to inspire and impact future generations.
Themes
BeautyGoodnessEnduranceVirtueTransience
In practice
Example use cases
Use this quote in a speech about inner beauty at a community event.
More from Sappho
All quotes →When I look on you a moment, then I can speak no more, but my tongue falls silent, and at once a delicate flame courses beneath my skin, and with my eyes I see nothing, and my ears hum, and a wet sweat bathes me and a trembling seizes me all over.
SapphoRead
Love is a cunning weaver of fantasies and fables.
SapphoRead
Someone, I tell you, in another time will remember us
SapphoRead
Death is an evil; the gods have so judged; had it been good, they would die.
SapphoRead
The moon is setand the Pleiades; Middle ofthe night, time passes by,I lie alone.
SapphoRead
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If we continue to make moral judgements (and whatever we say shall in fact continue) then we must believe that the conscience of man is not a product of nature.
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To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.
Mary MccarthyRead