“so does the stream of beauty, passing through the eyes which are the windows of the soul, come back to the beautiful one; there [255d] arriving and quickening the passages of the wings, watering them and inclining them to grow, and filling the soul of the beloved also with love.

And thus he loves, but he knows not what; he does not understand and cannot explain his own state; he appears to have caught the infection of blindness from another; the lover is his mirror in whom he is beholding himself, but he is not aware of this.

When he is with the lover, both cease from their pain, but when he is away then he longs as he is longed for, and has love's image, love for love lodging in his breast…” Phaedrus – Plato, translator – Benjamin Jowett 1871
"the most profound meaning of Venus – the beloved, be it person, object or intellectual idea, as the mirror of one’s own soul.”