Quotes About Dante

Great Authors—Classification—The World's Best Books. The Bible is the world's greatest book. Apart from its character as a work of divine revelation, it is the most perfect literature extant. Leaving out the Bible the three greatest works are those of Homer, Dante and Shakespeare. These are closely followed by the works of Virgil and Milton.

I've been thinking of a poet who is dying in New York, how these days she reads her beloved Dante, perhaps looking for something to frame what is happening to her. And whom, I wonder, do I turn to? Whom in this century do I read as if my life depended upon it?

Some artists attain to the cosmos of the spirit only by a practice of violence. They are artists who know hell and speak of it familiarly: Dante, Dostoievsky, Blake, Rimbaud, Henry Miler and Jim Morrison. The vocabulary used by these men opens up their passage through the flames. This is the violence of the spirit (not that of passion) in which the artist becomes the accuser of a wayward society.

For where the instrument of intelligence is added to brute power and evil will, mankind is powerless in its own defense.

O conscience, upright and stainless, how bitter a sting to thee is a little fault!

In that part of the book of my memory before which is little that can be read, there is a rubric, saying, "Incipit Vita Nova [The new life begins]."

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

For there is no greater pain, than to remember in present grief, past happinesses.

For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.

He would deny this is confronted, citing evasively his affection for Dante and Giotto, but anything overtly religious filled him with a pagan alarm; and I believe that like Pliny, whom he resembled in so many respects, he secretly thought it to be a degenerate cult carried to extravagant lengths.

If one is to read Dante, and understand him, one must become a Christian if only for a few hours.

One demands a little originality in these days, even from murderers, said Lady Swaffham. Like dramatists, you know--so much easier in Shakespeare's time, wasn't it? Always the same girl dressed up as a man, and even that borrowed from Boccaccio or Dante or somebody. I'm sure if I'd been a Shakespeare hero, the very minute I saw a slim-legged young page-boy I'd have said: 'Ods bodikins! There's that girl again!

One demands a little originality in these days, even from murderers," said Lady Swaffham. "Like dramatists, you know—so much easier in Shakespeare's time, wasn't it? Always the same girl dressed up as a man, and even that borrowed from Boccaccio or Dante or somebody. I'm sure if I'd been a Shakespeare hero, the very minute I saw a slim-legged young page-boy I'd have said: 'Ods-bodikins! There's that girl again!

EXCELLENT, BUNTER," SAID LORD Peter, sinking with a sigh into a luxurious armchair. "I couldn't have done better myself. The thought of the Dante makes my mouth water—and the 'Four Sons of Aymon.' And you've saved me £60—that's

Have some Oxford marmalade - and then I'll show you my Dante.

In Florence the sublime and terrible go hand in hand: Savonarola's Bonfires of the Vanities and Botticelli's Birth of Venus, Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks and Niccolò Macchiavelli's The Prince, Dante's Inferno and Boccaccio's Decameron.

What about the motorcycle parts? Those belong to my sort-of boyfriend. He's in Italy right now, visiting his family, and I like to have the mess around to remind me of him. Oh. So that's why Dante in Italian. She blushed and looked away. No. That's why the Italian boyfriend.

Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.

I felt for the tormented whirlwindsDamned for their carnal sinsCommitted when they let their passions rule their reason.

It may be that a more subtle person would find for this thing a reason of greater subtlety: but such is the reason that I find, and that liketh me best.

For where the instrument of intelligence is added to brute power and evil will, mankind is powerless in its own defense.

He told Clarence S. Brigham, of the American Antiquarian Society, that he had begun translating Dante's "Inferno" before he was married and he liked it so well that he kept right on with it and finished it afterward.

I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.

Longfellow smiled. "A great part of the happiness of life consists not in fighting battles, my dear Lowell, but in avoiding them. A masterly retreat is in itself a victory.