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.
There, pride, avarice, and envy are the tongues men know and heed, a Babel of depsair.
Love and the gentle heart are but the same thing.
When I had journeyed half of our life’s way, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray.
Abandon every hope, you who enter.
I hope for your sake you’ve got something inside that big body of yours!
I love to doubt as well as know.
Behold a God more powerful than I who comes to rule over me.
Love hath so long possessed me for his own And made his lordship so familiar.
I’m beginning to think I’ve got rotten luck with women.
My mother used to always tell me that my father was a man who fought for the weak. He had courage and righteous heart. In the name of my father, I will kill Mundus!
No sorrow is deeper than the remembrance of happiness when in misery.
My thoughts were full of other things When I wandered off the path.
You did thirst for blood, and with blood I fill you.
Before me there were no created things, Only eternity, and I too, last eternal. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!
Haste denies all acts their dignity.
I by not doing, not by doing, lost.
Salvation must grow out of understanding, total understanding can follow only from total experience, and experience must be won by the laborious discipline of shaping one’s absolute attention.
I say that when she appeared, in whatever place, by the hope embodied in that marvelous greeting, for me no enemy remained, in fact I shone with a flame of charity that made me grant pardon to whoever had offended me: and if anyone had then asked me anything my reply would only have been: ‘Love’, with an aspect full of humility.
Rejoice, Florence, seeing you are so great that over sea and land you flap your wings, and your name is widely known in Hell!