Quotes About Dante

Quién conoce el bien?. le preguntaron a Dante y él respondió: sólo quien conoce el mal.

And all the while one spirit uttered this, The other one did weep so, that, for pity, I swooned away as if I had been dying, And fell, even as a dead body falls.

Two unusual examples of the Gemini type in the field of letters are Dante and Bernard Shaw. Dante wrote his Inferno so that he could show in luminous verbiage all his enemies roasting in the pits of perdition. The Shavian humor has about it the bite of shallowness. It is not the deep laughter of the gods who understand all, but the shallow titillating laughter of mortals who understand not even themselves.

Perhaps one of the truths that Dante is trying to convey to us in this passage is that we can only ascend into the joy of God when we lighten up; when we can look down and smile upon our foolishness. Chesterton once said that the devil cannot laugh at himself and that he fell from heaven because of his gravity and that angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

All right, then, I'll say it: Dante makes me sick.

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.

This water lily was the same, and it was also like one of those miserable creatures whose singular torment, repeated indefinitely throughout eternity, aroused the curiosity of Dante, who would have asked the tormented creature himself to recount its cause and its particularities at greater length had Virgil, striding on ahead, not forced him to hurry after immediately, as my parents did me.

We will not have a real humanistic education…until professors, and their students, can give up the narcissistic illusion that through something called theory, or criticism, they can stand above Milton, Shakespeare, and Dante.

She had chosen Dante because she found the rhyme scheme pleasingly jaunty, but she realized too late that the Inferno's tale of sinners being cruelly punished in the afterlife was much too bloody and disturbing to be suitable for young minds. Penelope could tell this by the way the children hung on her every word and demanded "More, more!" each time she reached the end of a canto and tried to stop.

Dante's Hell is part of our world as much as part of the underworld, and shouldn't be avoided, Lowell said, but rather confronted. We sound the depths of Hell very often in this life.

Do not ask what brings Dante to man but what brings man to Dante-to personally enter his sphere, though it is forever severe and unforgiving.'

Dante's definition of hell: proximity without intimacy. From the Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing

Like we'd opened a portal to some level of Hell so profane and obscene even Dante never imagined it.

Dante recognized that every system of spiritual order, when it becomes incorporated into a worldly structure like an organized church, begins to suffer the effects of entropy. So to extract meaning from a system of beliefs a person must first compare the information contained in it with his or her concrete experience, retain what makes sense, and then reject the rest.

then transferred all Italy to be the property of the pope and removed to his city of Constantinople, leaving the manuscript recording his donation on the embalmed body of Saint Peter. "Alas, Constantine, how much evil didst thou mother!" exclaimed Dante. This is unfair to Constantine; the evil was mothered by some ingenious clerical zealot, who contrived probably the most momentous forgery in history.

This is, in fact, the subject of his House of Fame, a poem of his midcareer written, among other motives, to twit his illustrious predecessor Dante as a fame-seeking windbag.

It does seem somewhat classical. One can hardly credit that Dante did actually get shown around Hell.