When virtue lights in us 11 a fire of love, that love ignites another within the soul that sees its burning.
The blank-verse paragraph in English, as nearly as I can determine, runs to an average of about fourteen lines.
This writing is of bone and sinew.
Dante does, to be sure, write any number of run-on tercets, but the threeline unit remains firm as the rigorous basic measure of his way of writing.
No one, while hope shows any hint of green, is lost beyond return to love eternal merely because the Church has voiced its curse.
It treats of the most universal values – good and evil, man’s responsibility, free will and predestination; yet it is intensely personal and political, for it was written out of the anguish of a man who saw his life blighted by the injustice and corruption of his times.
The Divine Comedy is classically referred to as the epitome, the supreme expression of the Middle Ages.
The Comedy is a glorification of the ways of God, but it is also a sharp and great-minded protest at the ways in which men have thwarted the divine plan.
It cannot be that any eye, still clutched by mist and murkiness, should meet the first of ministers who’ll come from Paradise.
Now you can plainly see how deeply hidden truth is from scrutinists who would insist that every love is, in itself, praiseworthy; and they are led to error by the matter of love, because it may seem-always-good; but not each seal is fine, although the wax is.
From now on you will have to cast off sloth in this way,” said my master, “for one does not gain fame sitting on-down cushions, or while under coverlets; and whoever consumes his life without fame leaves a mark of himself on earth like smoke in the air or foam in water. And therefore stand up; conquer your panting with the spirit that conquers in every battle, if it does not let the heavy body crush it down.
Love that is kindled by virtue, will, in another find reply, as long as that love’s flame appears without...
What blind cupidity, what crazy rage impels us onwards in our little lives – then dunks us in this stew to all eternity!
Repentance fails? There can’t be absolution, nor penitence when willing ill goes on. That is, by contradiction, impossibile.
The young explorer from medieval Christendom went doggedly on from one work to another which he had seen mentioned, without adequate teachers, courses, reference works, or indeed, the.
I had set foot in that part of life beyond which one cannot go with any hope of returning.
I fell to thinking about my own life, now so debilitated, and reecting how short this life is, even in health, I began to weep about our wretched state. Sighing deeply, I said to myself: ‘One day, inevitably, even your most gracious Beatrice must die.’ This thought threw me into such a state of bewilderment that I closed my eyes, and I began, like a person who is delirious, to be tormented by these fantasies.
Before me nothing was created but eternal things and I endure eternally. Abandon every hope, ye that enter.
Thou shalt prove how salty tastes another’s bread, and how hard a path it is to go up and down another’s stairs.
Great flames are kindled where the small sparks fly.