Quotes from Dante Alighieri

The sad souls of those who lived without blame and without praise.

Necessity brings him [Dante] here, not pleasure.

Consider your origins: you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.

Do ye not comprehend that we are worms, Born to bring forth the angelic butterfly That flieth unto judgment without screen?

Heat cannot be separated from fire, or beauty from The Eternal.

I fell as a dead body falls.

Be as a tower firmly set Shakes not its top for any blast that blows.

Galeotto was the book and he that wrote it; that day we read in it no farther.

There sighs, lamentations and loud wailings resounded through the starless air, so that at first it made me weep; strange tongues, horrible language, words of pain, tones of anger, voices loud and hoarse, and with these the sound of hands, made a tumult which is whirling through that air forever dark, as sand eddies in a whirlwind.

As in the cold season their wings bear the starlings along in a broad, dense flock, so does that blast the wicked spirits. Hither, thither, downward, upward, it drives them.

Love hath so long possessed me for his ownAnd made his lordship so familiar.

Thou [Virgil] art my master and my author, thou art he from whom alone I took the style whose beauty has done me honor.

"Why is thy mind so entangled," said the Master [Virgil], "that thou slackenest thy pace? What is it to thee what they whisper there? Come after me and let the people talk. Stand like a firm tower that never shakes its top for blast of wind."

What sweet thoughts, what longing led them to the woeful pass.

The night that hides things from us.

Love, which is quickly kindled in the gentle heart, seized this man for the fair form that was taken from me, and the manner still hurts me. Love, which absolves no beloved one from loving, seized me so strongly with his charm that, as thou seest, it does not leave me yet.

And as he, who with laboring breath has escaped from the deep to the shore, turns to the perilous waters and gazes.

These wretches, who never were alive.

Go right on and listen as thou goest.

But when thou shalt be in the sweet world, I pray thee bring me to men's memory.

Without hope we live in desire.

Avarice, envy, pride,Three fatal sparks, have set the hearts of allOn Fire.

Consider your origin you were not born to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.

Follow your own star!