That your art, as best it can, also follows Divine Intellect, as the disciple follows the master; So in reality, your art is, as it were, God’s grandchild.
When he saw me weeping, he answered: ‘You must go another road, if you wish to escape this savage place. This creature, that distresses you, allows no man to cross her path, but obstructs him, to destroy him, and she has so vicious and perverse a nature, that she never sates her greedy appetite, and after food is hungrier than before.
Await no further word or sign from me: your will is free, erect, and whole – to act against that will would be to err: therefore I crown and miter you over yourself.
We were still some way from it, but not so far that I failed to discern in part what noble people occupied that place.
The ghost of the generous poet replied: ‘If I have understood your words correctly, your spirit is attacked by cowardly fear, that often weighs men down, so that it deflects them from honourable action, like a creature seeing phantoms in the dusk.
Those things that have the power to hurt are to be feared: not those other things that are not fearful. I am made such, by God’s grace, that your suffering does not touch me, nor does the fire of this burning scorch me.
We forget what we have heard if we do not write it down.
Hasty opinion too often points the wrong way, and then affection for one’s own opinion binds up the intellect.
Like the pages of a book soaked shut by time.
These are the radiancies of the perfected vision that sees the good and step by step moves nearer what it sees.
Well do I see how the Eternal Ray, which, once seen, kindles love forevermore, already shines on you. If on your way some other thing seduce your love, my brother, it can only be a trace, misunderstood, of this, which you see shining through the other.
Open your mind to what I shall explain, then close around it, for it is no learning to understand what one does not retain.
Nobility is the perfection in each thing of its proper nature.
I might then squeeze the juices of my thought more fully out of me.
What is a smile but the coruscation of the joy of the soul, like the outward shining of an inward light.
Hence we may overthrow the error of those who think to form the moral character of others by speaking well and doing ill; forgetting that the hands of Jacob were more persuasive with his father than his words, though his hands deceived and his voice spake truth.
God is the love that moves the sun and stars.
Christians, be steadier in what you do, not blown like feathers at the wind’s discretion, nor think that every water cleanses you...
Open thy mind; take in what I explain and keep it there; because to understand is not to know, if thou dost not retain...
Oh how time hangs and drags till our aid comes!