Tao Te Ching
Sappho
612 – 570 BCE
“The Poetess” and most famous Greek woman
The most beautiful singer of her age, a political force when only 19, one of the great “Nine Lyric Poets” of ancient Greece, called by Socrates, “The Beautiful,” by Plato the Tenth Muse, and “the Poetess” by all the Greek world; Sappho is the most famous Greek woman. In fear of her pen, politicians banished her twice and her poetry continued to inflame autocratic leaders for centuries – even Medieval Church leaders in Rome and Constantinople tried to burn all her 9 volumes of poetry in 1073 and remaining scraps of these weren’t found until 1897, some not until 2014. She started history’s first “finishing school” for girls and lived “laughing love’s low laughter… lost in the love trance."
Lineages
Artists Greek Poets Women of Wisdom
Eras
Western
Egyptian Civilization (3150 – 305 BCE)The Axial Age, “The Great Leap of Being” (800 – 200 BCE)
Unlisted Sources
Quotes by Sappho (15 quotes)
“My heart is like that of a child.”
Chapters:
55. Forever Young
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“What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful.”
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“Laughing love’s low laughter… Lost in the love trance.”
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“May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve.”
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“Love shook my heart like the wind on the mountain rushing over the oak trees.”
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“The gleaming stars all about the shining moon hide their bright faces, when—full-orbed and splendid in the sky—she floats, flooding the shadowed earth with clear silver light.”
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“You may blame Aphrodite soft as she is, she has almost killed me with love for that boy”
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“The female creature is a letter. The unborn children are the letters it carries. And the letters—although they have no voices—speak to people far away.”
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“On soft beds you satisfied your passion and there was no dance, no holy place from which we were absent.”
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“We are all born to lose life, and what is worse, girls, to lose youth. Can you believe my white hair was once black? Complaining knee-joints creak at every move. To think I danced as delicate as a deer!”
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“No holy place existed without us then, no woodland, no dance, no sound… I prayed one word: ‘I want.’”
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“Midnight comes--and goes, the hours fly and solitary still, I lie.”
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“There is no place for grief in a house which serves the Muse.”
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Quotes about Sappho (1 quotes)
“Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierarch requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism.”
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