The Divine Comedy

The more a thing is perfect, the more it feels pleasure and pain.

The devil is not as black as he is painted.

Through me you pass into the city of woe: Through me you pass into eternal pain: Through me among the people lost for aye. Justice the founder of my fabric moved: To rear me was the task of power divine, Supremest wisdom, and primeval love. Before me things create were none, save things Eternal, and eternal I shall endure. All hope abandon, ye who enter here.

O human race, born to fly upward, wherefore at a little wind dost thou so fall?

Consider your origin. You were not formed to live like brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.

Into the eternal darkness, into fire and into ice.

The man who lies asleep will never waken fame, and his desire and all his life drift past him like a dream, and the traces of his memory fade from time like smoke in air, or ripples on a stream.

The day that man allows true love to appear, those things which are well made will fall into cofusion and will overturn everything we believe to be right and true.

There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery

Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Lost are we, and are only so far punished, That without hope we live on in desire.

For she doth make my veins and pulses tremble.

I did not die, and yet I lost life’s breath

Segui il tuo corso et lascia dir les genti (Follow your road and let the people say)

The mind which is created quick to love, is responsive to everything that is pleasing, soon as by pleasure it is awakened into activity. Your apprehensive faculty draws an impression from a real object, and unfolds it within you, so that it makes the mind turn thereto. And if, being turned, it inclines towards it, that inclination is love; that is nature, which through pleasure is bound anew within you.

In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell what a wild, and rough, and stubborn wood this was, which in my thought renews the fear!

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 here were every fruit and never-ending spring; these streams--the nectar of which poets sing.

I found myself within a forest dark,

There, pride, avarice, and envy are the tongues men know and heed, a Babel of depsair

If the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.

As the geometer intently seeks to square the circle, but he cannot reach, through thought on thought, the principle he needs, so I searched that strange sight.

Oh blind, oh ignorant, self-seeking cupidity whcih spurs as so in the short mortal life and steeps as through all eternity.

I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightfoward pathway had been lost. Ah me! How hard a thing is to say, what was this forest savage, rough, and stern, which in the very thought renews the fear. So bitter is it, death is little more...

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.

Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path.

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.

I by not doing, not by doing, lost