The Philosophy of Love

This excerpt is written by a Mantinean woman named Diotima to Socrates. She attempts to reveal true beauty while showing him how to find it himself.
I don't necessarily know if love and beauty are synonymous words. I believe that we can love beauty, but can beauty make love? Love can make beauty. Where there is love there is beauty, without a doubt. But where there is beauty, there is not always love. Either way, Plato writes that Diotima says that "the quest for universal beauty must find a man ever mounting the heavenly ladder, starting from the individual beauties, from bodily beauty to the beauty of institutions, from institutions to learning, and from learning in general to the special lore that pertains to nothing but the beautiful itself."
I wonder what it would be like to gaze on beauty's very self, as she puts it, unsullied, unalloyed, and freed from the mortal taint that haunts the frailer loveliness of flesh and blood. We are only accustomed to the humanly love that we have experienced here on Earth, is this all we know, and can we know more?
The next part of this reading is a conversation between Socrates and Phaedrus, where Socrates lift up a charming prayer, asking to be granted beauty from within and requesting that whatever outward things that he have may be in harmony with the spirit inside of him.
It has been said that Socrates was quite hideous. If only his inside was reflected on the outside, then perhaps this prayer would ring true, and his physical appearance would cease it's ugliness.