Paradiso Quotes

“It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.”

“God's greatest gift to manIn all the bounty He was moved to makeThroughout creation-the one gift the mostClose to his goodness and the one He callsMost precious-is free will.”

“The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

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

“Fate's arrow, when expected, travels slow.”

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

“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...”

“Love, that moves the sun and the other stars”

“For those who are gifted for the soteriological pathway of marriage, it, like every such pathway, naturally offers not only trouble, work, and suffering but the deepest kind of existential satisfaction. Dante did not get to Paradiso without going through the Inferno. And so also there seldom exist "happy marriages".”