The wish to hear such baseness is degrading.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Love, that exempts no one beloved from loving,Seized me with pleasure of this man so strongly,That, as thou seest, it doth not yet desert me.
From a little spark may burst a flame.
Do not be afraid; our fateCannot be taken from us; it is a gift.
The fair request ought to be followed by the deed in silence.
Justice does not descend from its own pinnacle.
In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost.
If you, free as you are of every weighthad stayed below, then that would be as strangeas living flame on earth remaining still.And then she turned her gaze up toward the heavens.
High justice would in no way be debased if ardent love should cancel instantly the debts these penitents must satisfy.
Here sighs and cries and shrieks of lamentation echoed throughout the starless air of Hell;at first these sounds resounding made me weep:tongues confused, a language strained in anguishwith cadences o...
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
Those ancients who in poetry presented the golden age, who sang its happy state,perhaps, in their Parnassus, dreamt this place. Here, mankind's root was innocent; and herewere every fruit and never-en...
They had their faces twisted toward their haunches and found it necessary to walk backward, because they could not see ahead of them. ...And since he wanted so to see ahead, he looks behind and walks...
Abandon hope all ye who enter here.
I, answering in the end, began: 'Alas,how many yearning thoughts, what great desire,have lead them through such sorrow to their fate?
There, pride, avarice, and envy are the tongues men know and heed, a Babel of depsair
The well heeded well heard.
I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
He who best discerns the worth of time is most distressed whenever time is lost.