Best Dante Alighieri Quotes
Dante Alighieri Quotes About Italian, Hell, Life, Love, Inferno, Death, Latin, Neutrality, Goodreads & Success! The Italian poet Dante Alighieri, better known as Dante, was a significant figure in the Middle Ages. Dante’s writings are still extensively read in Italy, where he is revered as one of the country’s greatest poets. His year of birth has been forecast by historians to be 1265. Initially, he attended the Franciscan school at the Santa Croce Convent while transferring to the Dominican school in Santa Maria Novella.
Bologna was Dante’s home until 1285 when he studied law at the university. His first and most important work, La Vita Nuova (“New Life”), was published around this period and is widely considered one of Dolce Stil Nuovo’s most finely crafted instances. His contemporary and traditional Florentine poetry style, written in Volgare, is characterized as an informal dialect.
Dante is reported to have held many critical governmental positions in Florence between 1285 and 1301, although he was later outlawed in 1302. The last years of his life spent he in exile in Verona, where he met Bartolomeo Della Scala and other musicians. Dante wrote the “De vulgari eloquentia Libri duo,” a two-volume work on the virtues of the Italian language. When Dante first began his career with his most ambitious work, “La Divina Commedia” (“The Divine Comedy”), it was approximately 1307.
He finished it in 1321, only a few years before his death. The poem tells the story of a first-person narrator’s voyage through hell and paradise, where he meets the spirits of old historical characters. To fully appreciate Dante’s work, one must have a solid understanding of the scientific, intellectual, and political climate of the historical period in which it was written.
Dante Alighieri Quotes
1. “Do not be afraid; our fate cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.” – Dante Alighieri
2. “The poets leave hell and again behold the stars.” – Dante Alighieri
3. “As phantoms frighten beasts when shadows fall.” – Dante Alighieri
4. “My thoughts were full of other things When I wandered off the path.” – Dante Alighieri
5. “There is no greater sorrow than to recall our times of joy in wretchedness.” – Dante Alighieri
6. “They yearn for what they fear for.” – Dante Alighieri
7. “Wisdom is earned, not given.” – Dante Alighieri
8. “From there we came outside and saw the stars.” – Dante Alighieri
9. “Because your question searches for deep meaning, I shall explain in simple words.” – Dante Alighieri
10. “Our powers, whether of mind or tongue, cannot embrace that measure of understanding.” – Dante Alighieri
11. “Hope not ever to see Heaven. I have come to lead you to the other shore; into eternal darkness; into fire and into ice.” – Dante Alighieri
12. “It was the hour of morning, when the sun mounts with those stars that shone with it when God’s own love first set in motion those fair things.” – Dante Alighieri
13. “At grief so deep the tongue must wag in vain; the language of our sense and memory lacks the vocabulary of such pain.” – Dante Alighieri
14. “One ought to be afraid of nothing other than things possessed of power to do us harm, but things innocuous need not be feared.” – Dante Alighieri
15. “Soon you will be where your own eyes will see the source and cause and give you their own answer to the mystery.” – Dante Alighieri
17. “What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” – Dante Alighieri
18. “The path to paradise begins in hell.” – Dante Alighieri
19. “We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.” – Dante Alighieri
20. “Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.” – Dante Alighieri
21. “Hell is—other people!” – Dante Alighieri
22. “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” – Dante Alighieri
23. “Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” – Dante Alighieri
24. “I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine.” – Dante Alighieri
25. “I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.” – Dante Alighieri
26. “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.” – Dante Alighieri
28. “An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.” – Dante Alighieri
29. “Hell is just a frame of mind.” – Dante Alighieri
30. “I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity.” – Dante Alighieri
