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The Divine Comedy quotes
10 quotes from The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. Source: Project Gutenberg e-text #8800 (public domain in the USA), the text this site’s reader shows. Each quote is copied exactly from that text and links to its passage in the reader; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against the reader’s text.
Call to mind from whence we sprang: Ye were not form’d to live the life of brutes But virtue to pursue and knowledge high.
“All hope abandon ye who enter here.”
Through me you pass into the city of woe: Through me you pass into eternal pain: Through me among the people lost for aye.
No greater grief than to remember days Of joy, when mis’ry is at hand!
One day For our delight we read of Lancelot, How him love thrall’d. Alone we were, and no Suspicion near us. Ofttimes by that reading Our eyes were drawn together, and the hue Fled from our alter’d cheek.
Here vigour fail’d the tow’ring fantasy: But yet the will roll’d onward, like a wheel In even motion, by the Love impell’d, That moves the sun in heav’n and all the stars.
In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray Gone from the path direct: and e’en to tell It were no easy task, how savage wild That forest, how robust and rough its growth, Which to remember only, my dismay Renews, in bitterness not far from death.
Love, that in gentle heart is quickly learnt, Entangled him by that fair form, from me Ta’en in such cruel sort, as grieves me still: Love, that denial takes from none belov’d, Caught me with pleasing him so passing well, That, as thou see’st, he yet deserts me not.
His glory, by whose might all things are mov’d, Pierces the universe, and in one part Sheds more resplendence, elsewhere less.
I return’d From the most holy wave, regenerate, If ’en as new plants renew’d with foliage new, Pure and made apt for mounting to the stars.