Divine comedy Quotes

“[Comedies], in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man.... Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachments to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.”

“Come on, shake off the covers of this sloth, for sitting softly cushioned, or tucked in bed, is no way to win fame.”

“...but which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost? Only men of epic stomach can digest these epic tales.”

“Was I (am I not still?) a victim of words and books merely, and are books just an excuse for living, living things out in parenthesis, even in the most desolate stony place as I was, quotations and misquotations raining down on me thick and fast – words, words, words – the multitude of words, a parody of rain? For after all, as old Mrs Feany said, the rain is healthy. And the rain it raineth everyday. But the stuff of books and solitude and spying on the poor, could they be healthy? Or were my doubts the real heresy and treason? What book ever changed the world? It seems a solipsism to say that what changes the way we see the world, changes the world, but it is not. Where do you want me to begin? The Bible, Das Kapital? The Divine Comedy, The Satanic Verses?”

“All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”

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

“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.”

“There is no greater sorrow than to recall our time of joy in wretchedness.”

“Oh human creatures, born to soar aloft,Why fall ye thus before a little wind?”

“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-ending spring; these streams--the nectar of which poets sing.”