"Divine Comedy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as readily as English; French and the modern Greek with a little more difficulty; and could read in Greek, Latin, and Spanish. His books were the "Meditations" of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and Dante's "Divine Comedy," with the "Aeneis," Ariosto, and some old Spanish romances next in order. I do not think he cared greatly for any English writers but Donne and Izaak Walton, of whose "Angler" and "Life of Sir Henry Wotton" he was inordinately fond. ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... For fourteen centuries the ideal of this life was the anchorite or monk. If you would estimate the power of such a conception and the grandeur of the transformation it imposes on human faculties and habits, read, in turn, the great Christian poem and the great pagan poem, one the 'Divine Comedy' and the other the 'Odyssey' and the 'Iliad.' Dante has a vision and is transported out of our little ephemeral sphere into eternal regions; he beholds its tortures, its expiations and its felicities; he is affected by superhuman anguish and ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... of vitality in the artist. Hence music and literature, although never actually reproducing any part of them, may be strongly affected by their character. The Vita Nuova, the really great (not merely historically interesting) passages of the Divine Comedy, and the popular songs of Tigri's collection, are as much the outcome of these Tuscan mountains and hills, as is any picture in which we recognise their outlines and colours. Indeed, it happens that of literal rendering (as distinguished from ever-present reference to quality of air or light, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... on the Divine Comedy of Dante," in English, printed in Italy, has just reached me. I am delighted to find that this biography of Love, however romantic, is true! In his ninth year, Dante was a lover and a poet! The tender sonnet, free from all obscurity, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... reconcile Guelphs and Ghibellines; while on an embassy to Rome his house in Florence destroyed in a riot, and he condemned to exile; his life thenceforth one of wandering; settled in Ravenna in 1320, where he died a year later; all his works except "Vita Nuova" written in exile; his "Divine Comedy" in ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... unbounded contempt of all lies and shams and tricks. These traits will make his memory dear to all who knew him. And as Florence, too late, repented of her ingratitude to Dante, and appointed her most learned men to expound the "Divine Comedy" when he was dead, so will the writings of Webster be more and more a study among lawyers and statesmen. His fame will spread, and grow wider and greater, like that of Bacon and Burke, and of other benefactors of mankind; and his ideas will not pass away ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... remembered for his simple and touching poems, full of the landscape and of the rural life of his native Brittany. He also translated Dante's Divine Comedy. ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... the world always associates the still greater figure of one who was proud to call him master—that of Dante. More than is true of almost any other writer, his work is a compendium of the life of his time. The "Divine Comedy" is first of all poetry, and poetry of the loftiest order; but it is also an embodiment of the learning, the philosophy, and the theology of his age. It mirrors at once the greatness and the limitations of the medieval mind. Dante is not modern in the sense that Horace is, though he is ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... working and waiting many long and weary years that put one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars into "The Angelus." Millet's first attempts were mere daubs, the later were worth fortunes. Schiller "never could get done." Dante sees himself "growing lean over his Divine Comedy." It is working and waiting ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... or two of those editions is to be found the title of "The Vision," which I have adopted, as more conformable to the genius of our language than that of "The Divine Comedy." Dante himself, I believe, termed it simply "The Comedy;" in the first place, because the style was of the middle kind: and in the next, because the story (if story it may be ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... popular poet, who has written the nearest approach to a real epic, and the poems most likely to live, in his Wreck of the Hesperus, Skeleton in Armor, Golden Legend, Hiawatha, Tales of a Wayside Inn, Courtship of Miles Standish, and Evangeline, besides translating Dante's grand epic The Divine Comedy. ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... Patrick, which Giraldus Cambrensis was to give seven centuries later. It cannot be doubted for a moment, after the able researches of Messrs. Ozanam, Labitte, and Wright, that to the number of poetical themes which Europe owes to the genius of the Celts, is to be added the framework of the Divine Comedy. ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... should take more than an hour to read, the essence of a work of art being its unity of impression and of effect. Still, it would be difficult to accept absolutely a canon of art which would place the Divine Comedy on the shelf and deprive us of the Bothwell of Mr. Swinburne. A work of art is to be estimated by its beauty not by its size, and in Mr. Wills's Melchior there is beauty of a rich and ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... literature. Among the fictions that may be compared with them we may mention "The Voyage of St. Brendan," "The Vision of Albericus," and "St. Patrick's Purgatory," imaginary descriptions, like Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy," of the supposed abode of the dead. The narrative of Marbodius is one of the latest works dealing with this theme, but it ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... the head of Ruggieri, and wiping his jaws with the hair that he might tell his story, cannot fail to give a feeling of horror and disgust, which even the glorious wings of Dante's angels—the most sublime of all such creations—would fail to chase away. The poetry of the Divine Comedy belongs to nature; its superstition, intolerance, and fanaticism, to the thirteenth century. These last have either passed away from the modern world or they exist in new forms, and with the first alone can we have any real ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... that time, or ever for the whole of Dante. During my first year in Venice I met an ingenious priest, who had been a tutor in a patrician family, and who was willing to lead my faltering steps through the "Inferno." This part of the "Divine Comedy" I read with a beginner's carefulness, and with a rapture in its beauties, which I will whisper the reader do not appear ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... however, a man in a Galway village who can see nothing but wickedness. Some think him very holy, and others think him a little crazed, but some of his talk reminds one of those old Irish visions of the Three Worlds, which are supposed to have given Dante the plan of the Divine Comedy. But I could not imagine this man seeing Paradise. He is especially angry with the people of faery, and describes the faun- like feet that are so common among them, who are indeed children of Pan, to prove them children of Satan. He ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats |
