Dante Paradiso Quotes

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

Into the eternal darkness, into fire and into ice.

Love, that moves the sun and the other stars

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.

And then there was you. You changed everything I believed in. You know that line from Dante that I quoted to you in the park? 'L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle'?" Her lips curled a little at the sides as she looked up at him. "I still don't speak Italian." "It's a bit of the very last verse from Paradiso - Dante's Paradise. 'My will and my desire were turned by love, the love that moves the sun and the other stars.' Dante was trying to explain faith, I think, as an overpowering love, and maybe it's blasphemous, but that's how I think of the way I love you. You came into my life and suddenly I had one truth to hold on to - that I loved you, and you loved me.

The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

ma gia volgena il mio disio e'l velle si come rota ch'igualmente e mossa, l'amor che move: i sole e l'altre stelle ...as a wheel turns smoothtly, free from jars, my will and my desire were turned by love, The love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Fate's arrow, when expected, travels slow.

As one who sees in dreams and wakes to find the emotional impression of his vision still powerful while its parts fade from his mind - Just such am I, having lost nearly all the vision itself, while in my heart I feel the sweetness of it yet distill and fall.

Open your mind to what I shall disclose, and hold it fast within you; he who hears, but does not hold what he has heard, learns nothing.

all things created have an order in themselves, and this begets the form that lets the universe resemble God.

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.

From a little spark may burst a flame.

And as he, who with laboring breath has escaped from the deep to the shore, turns to the perilous waters and gazes.

Faith is the substance of the things we hope for, And evidence of those that are not seen...

If you, free as you are of every weight had stayed below, then that would be as strange as living flame on earth remaining still." And then she turned her gaze up toward the heavens.

O grace abounding and allowing me to dare to fix my gaze on the Eternal Light, so deep my vision was consumed in it! I saw how it contains within its depths all things bound in a single book by love of which creation is the scattered leaves: how substance, accident, and their relation were fused in such a way that what I now describe is but a glimmer of that Light.

Lady, you who are so great, so powerful, that who seeks grace without recourse to you would have his wish fly upward without wings.

God's greatest gift to man In all the bounty He was moved to make Throughout creation-the one gift the most Close to his goodness and the one He calls Most precious-is free will.

It's a bit of the very last verse from Paradiso- Dante's Paradise. 'My will and my desire were turned by love, the love that moves the sun and the other stars.' Dante was trying to explain faith, I thnk, as an overpowering love, and maybe it's blasphemous, but that's how I think of the way that I love you. You came into my life and suddenly I had one truth to hold on to- that I loved you, and you loved me.

All Being within this order, by the laws of its own nature is impelled to find its proper station round its Primal Cause. Thus every nature moves across the tide of the great sea of being to its own port, each with its given instinct as its guide.

God is the love that moves the sun and stars.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say

Great fire can follow a small spark: there may be better voices after me to pray to Cyrrha's god for aid - that he may answer.

Here powers failed my high imagination: But by now my desire and will were turned, Like a balanced wheel rotated evenly, By the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

But in the divine nature Persons three, And in one person the divine and human.

And what will bow your shoulders down will be the vicious and worthless company with whom you will fall into this abyss.

A l'alta fantasia qui mancò possa; ma già volgeva il mio disio e'l velle sì come rota ch'igualmente è mossa, l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.

O you, who in some pretty boat, Eager to listen, have been following Behind my ship, that singing sails along Turn back to look again upon your own shores; Tempt not the deep, lest unawares, In losing me, you yourselves might be lost. The sea I sail has never yet been passed; Minerva breathes, and pilots me Apollo, And Muses nine point out to me the Bears. You other few who have neck uplifted Betimes to the bread of angels upon Which one lives and does not grow sated, Well may you launch your vessel Upon the deep sea.

Hell exists from within.

Whoso laments, that we must doff this garb Of frail mortality, thenceforth to live Immortally above, he hath not seen The sweet refreshing, of that heav’nly shower.

Behave like men, and not like witless sheep...

Open thy mind; take in what I explain and keep it there; because to understand is not to know, if thou dost not retain...

beheld a power whose head was crowned with signs of victory.

O virgin mother, daughter of thy Son, humble beyond all creatures and more exalted; predestined turning point of God's intention; Thy merit so ennobled human nature that its divine Creator did not scorn to make Himself the creature of His creature. The Love that was rekindled in Thy womb sends for the warmth of the eternal peace within whose ray this flower has come to bloom. Here to us, thou art the noon and scope of Love revealed; and among mortal men, the living fountain of eternal hope.

Fate's arrow, when expected, travels slow

So what brings you to this killing pickle?

the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars.

Thus it was up to God, to Him alone in His own ways - by one or both, I say - to give man back his whole life and perfection. But since a deed done is more prized the more it manifests within itself the mark of the loving heart and goodness of the doer, the Everlasting Love, whose seal is plain on all the wax of the world was pleased to move in all His ways to raise you up again. There was not, nor will be, from the first day to the last night, an act so glorious and so magnificent, on either way. For God, in giving Himself that man might be able to raise himself, gave even more than if he had forgiven him in mercy. All other means would have been short, I say, of perfect justice, but that God's own Son humbled Himself to take on mortal clay. -Paradiso, Canto VII

The writer, having lost his way in a gloomy forest, and being hindered by certain wild beasts from ascending a mountain, is met by Virgil, who promises to show him the punishments of Hell, and afterwards of Purgatory; and that he shall then be conducted by Beatrice into Paradise. He follows the Roman Poet.

They lived before the Christian age began. They paid no reverence, as was due to God. And in this number I myself am one.  40         For such deficiencies, no other crime, we all are lost yet only suffer harm through living in desire, but hopelessly.

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.

Christians, be steadier in what you do, not blown like feathers at the wind's discretion, nor think that every water cleanses you...

These are the radiancies of the perfected vision that sees the good and step by step moves nearer what it sees.

My sins and crimes were horrible to hear. God, though, unendingly is good. His arms enfold and grasp all those who turn to Him.

All mankind’s institutions, of every sort, have their own death, though in what long endures it is hidden from you, your own lives being short. [XVI:79-81]

Your life is breathed forth immediately/ by the Chief Good, who so enamors it/ of His own self that it desires Him always.

Open your mind to what I shall explain, then close around it, for it is no learning to understand what one does not retain.

We all so willingly record our gains, until the hour that leads us into loss. Then every single thought is tears and sadness.

    I saw there, on that threshold – framed – more than a thousand who had rained from Heaven. Spitting in wrath. ‘Who’s that,’ they hissed, ‘who, yet undead,  85         travels the kingdom of the truly dead?

The hope is that here, as in other respects, the reader is invited into a critical and collaborative venture, seeing what Dante sees and constructing along with him (as he himself asks his reader to do, for instance, in Paradiso 13: 1–18) the relationships that define us humans in our own participation in existence.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Poeta fui, e cantai di quel giusto figliuol d'Anchise che venne di Troia, poi che 'l superbo Ilión fu combusto.

Usury is an act of Violence against Art, which is the child of Nature and hence the Grandchild of God. (By

Dante’s Cantos average about 140 lines. As a general thing he requires no more than twenty or thirty lines to identify the sinner and to describe the punishment.

Form, in its interrelations, is the most speaking element.

English “broadcast” once meant specifically “a way of sowing” and was borrowed by radio as an analogy.

a sense of the right-choice-alwaysbeing-made”; and this applies to everything from the smallest word to the harmonious interrelation of the principal divisions.

The resulting effect to the ear, which must be the supreme judge in these matters,

works themselves, except as he could beg or borrow the manuscripts.

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate'.

ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.

le mani alzò con amendue le fiche,

gridando: «Togli, Dio, ch'a te le squadro!».

150 sì ch'ogne Bianco ne sarà feruto.

Allor li fu l'orgoglio sì caduto,

E 'l duca mio a me: «O tu che siedi tra li scheggion del ponte quatto quatto, sicuramente omai a me ti riedi».

Love, which in gentlest hearts will soonest bloom seized my lover with passion for that sweet body from which I was torn unshriven to my doom

 Se mala cupidigia altro vi grida, uomini siate, e non pecore matte,

Through the waters spilled by the spring, I was remade. Forth I fared, a new plant with new leaves in a new time. The stars were there, and I was set to climb.

through furiousness Of ne’er abated pruriency.

Temer si dee di sole quelle cose c'hanno potenza di fare altrui male; de l'altre no, ché non son paurose.

For when the powers of working intellect are wed to strength and absolute illwill, then humans cannot find a place to hide.

What blind cupidity, what crazy rage impels us onwards in our little lives – then dunks us in this stew to all eternity!

The blank-verse paragraph in English, as nearly as I can determine, runs to an average of about fourteen lines.

This writing is of bone and sinew.

Dante does, to be sure, write any number of run-on tercets, but the threeline unit remains firm as the rigorous basic measure of his way of writing.

The Divine Comedy is classically referred to as the epitome, the supreme expression of the Middle Ages.

The Comedy is a glorification of the ways of God, but it is also a sharp and great-minded protest at the ways in which men have thwarted the divine plan.

He eyed the snake. The reptile eyed him back. Each gave out smoke in streams – the wound of one, the serpent’s jaws. The smoke streams slowly met.

Quick! Quick! Let’s lose no time through lack of love!’ so all of those behind now shouted out. ‘For zeal in doing good turns grace new green.

How cautious we must always be when faced with those who, far beyond observing deeds, can gaze in wisdom on our very thoughts.

Always, to every truth that looks, in face, like lies, one ought (quite firmly) bar the lip lest, guiltless, what one says should still bring shame.

And he, my strength, swung straight around to say: ‘Why so dismayed and faithless? Don’t you know that I am with you and still guide your steps?

Repentance fails? There can’t be absolution, nor penitence when willing ill goes on. That is, by contradiction, impossibile.

It cannot be that any eye, still clutched by mist and murkiness, should meet the first of ministers who’ll come from Paradise.

Remember this, if Fortune leads you on to where such spats as this are played out loud. 148 To wish to hear such stuff is pretty low.

The young explorer from medieval Christendom went doggedly on from one work to another which he had seen mentioned, without adequate teachers, courses, reference works, or indeed, the

Take, for example, Paradiso by Dante, which manages an artistically interpreted—but not inaccurate—understanding of the Earth and its atmosphere. The mystique of Dante’s heaven may be attributed to both scientific and magical forces.

¿Por qué te enamora mi faz de tal suerte que no te vuelves hacia el hermoso jardín que florece bajo los rayos de Cristo? Allí están la rosa en que el Verbo divino encarnó; y allí están los lirios por cuyo aroma se descubre el buen camino.

people, when they see their leader snatch at those same goods that greedily they crave, graze on just those, and do not seek beyond. 103 So – as you may well see – bad government is why the world is so malignant now. It’s not that nature is corrupt in you.

It treats of the most universal values—good and evil, man’s responsibility, free will and predestination; yet it is intensely personal and political, for it was written out of the anguish of a man who saw his life blighted by the injustice and corruption of his times.

I think it reaches heights of poetry which you get nowhere else: an ether almost too fine to breathe. It is a pity that I can give you no notion what it is like. Can you imagine Shelley at his most ecstatic combined with Milton at his most solemn and rigid? It sounds impossible I know, but that is what Dante has done...

Because your human longings point to where portions grow smaller in shared fellowship, meanness of mind must make the bellows sigh. 52 If love, though, seeking for the utmost sphere, should ever wrench your longings to the skies, such fears would have no place within your breast. 55 For, there, the more that we can speak of “ours”, the more each one possesses of the good and, in that cloister, caritas burns brighter.

Not like Dante discovering a commedia upon the slopes of heaven I would paint a different kind of Paradiso in which the people would be naked as they always are in scenes like that because it is supposed to be a painting of their souls but there would be no anxious angels telling them how heaven is the perfect picture of a monarchy and there would be no fires burning in the hellish holes below in which I might have stepped nor any altars in the sky except fountains of imagination

This seeming incongruity has long troubled me. I owe Professor MacAllister a glad thanks for what is certainly the essential clarification. The whole Purgatorio, he points out, is built upon the structure of a Mass. The Mass moreover is happening not on the mountain but in church with Dante devoutly following its well-known steps. I have not yet had time to digest Professor MacAllister’s suggestion, but it strikes me immediately as a true insight and promises another illuminating way of reading the Purgatorio.

He has time for gossip, for prophecies, for marvelous dramatic interplays, for treatises on history, for analyzing the French monarchy, the corruption of the Church, the decay of Italian politics. He has time for all sorts of metaphysical treatises on such matters as the nature of the generative principle, literary criticism, meteorology—in short, for his whole unfinished encyclopedia. And he still has time to invent a death for Ulysses, to engage in a metamorphic contest with Ovid, to make side remarks to his friends.

...Because the sacred fire that lights all nature liveliest of all in its own image glows. All these prerogatives the human creature possesses, and if one of them should fail, he must diminish from his noble stature. Sin only can disenfranchise him, and veil his likeness to the Highest Good; whereby the light in him is lessened and grows pale. Ne'er can he win back dignities so high till the void made by guilt be all filled in with just amends paid for by illicit joy. Now, when your nature as a whole did sin in its first root, it lost these great awards, and lost the Eden of its origin; nor might they be recovered afterwards by any means, as if thou search thou'lt see, except by crossing one of these two fords; either must God, of his sole courtesy, remit, or man must pay with all that's his, the debt of sin in its entirety. Within the Eternal Counsel's deep abyss rivet thine eye, and with a heed as good as thou canst give me, do thou follow this. Man from his finite assets never could make satisfaction; ne'er could he abase him so low, obey thereafter all he would, as he'd by disobedience sought to raise him; and for this cause man might not pay his due himself, nor from the debtor's roll erase him. Needs then must God, by his own ways, renew man's proper life, and reinstate him so; his ways I say - by one, or both of two. And since the doer's actions ever show more gracious as the style of them makes plain the goodness of the heart from which they flow, that most high Goodness which is God was fain - even God, whose impress Heaven and earth display - by all His ways to lift you up again; nor, between final night and primal day, was e'er proceeding so majestical and high, nor shall not be, by either way; for God's self-giving, which made possible that man should raise himself, showed more largesse than if by naked power He'd cancelled all; and every other means would have been less than justice, if it had not pleased God's Son to be humiliate in fleshliness.

But I have said enough about the negative side of the anima. There are just as many important positive aspects. The anima is, for instance, responsible for the fact that a man is able to find the right marriage partner. Another function is at least equally important: Whenever a man’s logical mind is incapable of discerning facts that are hidden in his unconscious, the anima helps him to dig them out. Even more vital is the role that the anima plays in putting a man’s mind in tune with the right inner values and thereby opening the way into more profound inner depths. It is as if an inner “radio” becomes tuned to a certain wave length that excludes irrelevancies but allows the voice of the Great Man to be heard. In establishing this inner “radio” reception, the anima takes on the role of guide, or mediator, to the world within and to the Self. That is how she appears in the example of the initiations of shamans that I described earlier; this is the role of Beatrice in Dante’s Paradiso, and also of the goddess Isis when she appeared in a dream to Apuleius, the famous author of The Golden Ass, in order to initiate him into a higher, more spiritual form of life.

Here we should notice a peculiar fact: that there are movements which are both essentially involuntary and yet confined to persons - to creatures with a self-conscious perspective. Smiles and blushes are the two most prominent examples. Milton puts the point finely in Paradise Lost: for smiles from Reason flow, To brute denied, and are of love the food. These physiognomic movements owe their rich intentionality to this involuntary character, for it is this which suggests that they show the other 'as he really is'. Hence they become the pivot and focus of our interpersonal responses, and of no response more than sexual desire. The voluntary smile is not a smile at all, but a kind of grimace which, while it may have its own species of sincerity—as in the smile of Royalty, which as it were pays lip-service to good nature — is not esteemed as an expression of the soul. On the contrary, it is perceived as a mask, which conceals the 'real being' of the person who wears it. Smiling must be understood as a response to another person, to a thought or perception of his presence, and it has its own intentionality. To smile is to smile at something or someone, and hence when we see someone smiling in the street we think of him as 'smiling to himself, meaning that there is some hidden object of his present thought and feeling. The smile of love is a kind of intimate recognition and acceptance of the other's presence - an involuntary acknowledgement that his existence gives you pleasure. The smile of the beloved is not flesh, but a kind of stasis in the movement of the flesh. It is a paradigm of 'incarnation': of the other made flesh, and so transforming the flesh in which he is made. Thus the smile of Beatrice conveys her spiritual reality; Dante must be fortified in order to bear it, for to look at it is to look at the sun (Paradiso, XXIII, 47—8): tu hai vedute cose, che possente set fatto a sostener lo riso mio.