Beauty … is the sole aspect of the spiritual which we can perceive through our senses. — Thomas Mann

Socrates … said the subtlest thing of all: that the lover was nearer the divine than the beloved.

Beauty, then, is the beauty-lover’s way to the spirit—but only the way, only the means.

Amor, in sooth, is like the mathematician who in order to give children a knowledge of pure form must do so in the language of pictures; so, too, the god, in order to make visible the spirit, avails himself of the forms and colours of human youth, gilding it with all imaginable beauty that it may serve memory as a tool, the very sight of which then sets us afire with pain and longing.