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Sappho on Valentine's Day

630 BC–570 BC Greece

← All quotes by Sappho

10 quotes

A handsome man guards his image a while;
a good man will one day take on beauty.

Sweet mother, I truly cannot weave my web; for I am o’erwhelmed through Aphrodite with love of a slender youth.

Now Love masters my limbs and shakes me, fatal creature, bitter-sweet.

For even if she flies she shall soon follow and if she rejects gifts, shall soon offer them and if she loves not shall soon love, however reluctant.

To have beauty is to have only that,
but to have goodness
is to be beautiful
too.

Some say a host of cavalry, some say infantry.
Some say a host of ships, is the loveliest thing
Upon this dark earth; but I say
It's whatever you love.

Love has unbound my limbs and set me shaking,
A monster bitter-sweet and my unmaking.

Beauty endures only for as long as it can be seen;
Goodness, beautiful today, will remain so tomorrow.

Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (1955)

I loved you, Atthis, once, long, long ago...
You seemed to me a small, ungainly child.

Rennell Rodd, Love, Worship and Death: Some Renderings from the Greek Anthology (London: Edward Arnold, 1919)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Sappho (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.