Dante Alighieri

E'n la sua volontade è nostra pace.

In His will is our peace.

Dante Alighieri (c. 30 May 1265 – 13 September 1321), most likely baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri, was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. His Divine Comedy, originally called Comedìa (modern Italian: Commedia) and later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language.

See also: Divine Comedy

Quotes

La Vita Nuova (1293)

Here begins a new life.

To her perfection all of beauty tends.

Love hath so long possessed me for his own
And made his lordship so familiar.

• In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria, dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica, la quale dice: Incipit vita nova. [1]
  • In that book which is
    My memory...
    On the first page
    That is the chapter when
    I first met you
    Appear the words...
    Here begins a new life.
  • Chapter I, opening lines (as reported in The 100 Best Love Poems of All Time by Leslie Pockell.[2])
  • In that part of the book of my memory before the which is little that can be read, there is a rubric, saying, Incipit Vita Nova. [Footnote: “Here beginneth the new life.”]
  • Translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti [3]

• Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi.
  • Behold a God more powerful than I who comes to rule over me.
  • Chapter I (tr. Barbara Reynolds); of love.

• ne le braccia avea
  madonna involta in un drappo dormendo.
  Poi la svegliava, e d'esto core ardendo
  lei paventosa umilmente pascea:
  appresso gir lo ne vedea piangendo.
  • In his arms, my lady lay asleep, wrapped in a veil.
    He woke her then and trembling and obedient
    She ate that burning heart out of his hand;
    Weeping I saw him then depart from me.
  • Chapter I, First Sonnet (tr. Mark Musa)

• Ella è quanto de ben pò far natura;
  per essemplo di lei bieltà si prova.
  • She is the sum of nature's universe.
    To her perfection all of beauty tends.
  • Chapter XIV, lines 49–50 (tr. Barbara Reynolds)

• Amore e 'l cor gentil sono una cosa...
  e così esser l'un sanza l'altro osa
  com'alma razional sanza ragione.
  • Love and the gracious heart are a single thing...
    one can no more be without the other
    than the reasoning mind without its reason.
  • Chapter XVI (tr. Mark Musa)

• Sì lungiamente m'ha tenuto Amore
  e costumato a la sua segnoria
  • Love hath so long possessed me for his own
    And made his lordship so familiar.
  • Chapter XXIV

Il Convivio (1304–1307)

• Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona
  de la mia donna disiosamente...
  che lo 'ntelletto sovr'esse disvia.
  • Love with delight discourses in my mind
    Upon my lady's admirable gifts...
    Beyond the range of human intellect.
  • Trattato Terzo, line 1.

• La moralitade è bellezza de la filosofia.
  • Morality is the beauty of Philosophy.
  • Trattato Terzo, Ch. 15.

De Monarchia (1312-1313)

• Nam in omni actione principaliter intenditur ab agente, sive necessitate naturae, sive voluntarie agat, propriam similitudinem explicare, unde fit, quod omne agens, in quantum huiusmodi, delectatur; quia, quum omne quod est appetat suum esse, ac in agendo agentis esse quodammodo amplietur, sequiturde necessitate delectatio... Nihil igitur agit, nisi tale existens, quale patiens fieri debet...
  • For in every action what is primarily intended by the doer, whether he acts from natural necessity or out of free will, it is the disclosure of his own image. Hence it comes about that every doer, in so far as he does, takes delight in doing; since everything that is desires its own being, and since in action the being of the doer is somehow intensified, delight necessarily follows... Thus, nothing acts unless [by acting] it makes patent its latent self.
  • Libri iii, Caput XIII, (XV.) emendati Johann Heinrich F. Karl Witte (1874) p. 25. Translation as quoted by Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958) p. 175.

Epistolae (Letters)

The subject of the whole work, then, taken in the literal sense only is "the state of souls after death" without qualification, for the whole progress of the work hinges on it and about it. Whereas if the work be taken allegorically, the subject is "man as by good or ill deserts, in the exercise of the freedom of his choice, he becomes liable to rewarding or punishing justice."

• Hiis visis, manifestum est quod duplex oportet esse subiectum circa quod currant alterni sensus. Et ideo videndum est de subiecto huius operis, prout ad litteram accipitur; deinde de subiecto, prout allegorice sententiatur. Est ergo subiectum totius operis, litteraliter tantum accepti, status animarum post mortem simpliciter sumptus. Nam de illo et circa illum totius operis versatur processus. Si vero accipiatur opus allegorice, subiectum est homo, prout merendo et demerendo per arbitrii libertatem iustitie premiandi et puniendi obnoxius est.
  • When we understand this we see clearly that the subject round which the alternative senses play must be twofold. And we must therefore consider the subject of this work [the Divine Comedy] as literally understood, and then its subject as allegorically intended. The subject of the whole work, then, taken in the literal sense only is "the state of souls after death" without qualification, for the whole progress of the work hinges on it and about it. Whereas if the work be taken allegorically, the subject is "man as by good or ill deserts, in the exercise of the freedom of his choice, he becomes liable to rewarding or punishing justice."
  • Letter to Can Grande (Epistle XIII, 23–25), as translated by Charles Singleton in his essay "Two Kinds of Allegory" published in Dante Studies 1 (Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 87.

• Genus vero philosophie, sub quo hic in toto et parte proceditur, est morale negotium, sive ethica; quia non ad speculandum, sed ad opus inventum est totum et pars.
  • Now the kind of philosophy under which we proceed in the whole and in the part is moral philosophy or ethics; because the whole was undertaken not for speculation but for practice.
  • Letter to Can Grande (Epistle XIII, 40), as translated by Charles Latham in A Translation of Dante's Eleven Letters (1891), Letter XI, §16, p. 199.

Misattributed

• The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
  • Henry Powell Spring in 1944; popularized by John F. Kennedy misquoting Dante (24 June 1963). Dante placed those who "non furon ribelli né fur fedeli" [were neither for nor against God] in a special region near the mouth of Hell; the lowest part of Hell, a lake of ice, was for traitors.
  • According to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum President Kennedy got his facts wrong. Dante never made this statement. The closest to what President Kennedy meant is in the Inferno where the souls in the ante-room of hell, who "lived without disgrace and without praise," and the coward angels, who did not rebel but did not resist the cohorts of Lucifer, are condemned to continually chase a banner that is forever changing course while being stung by wasps and horseflies.
  • See Canticle I (Inferno), Canto 3, vv 35-42 for the notion of neutrality and where JFK might have paraphrased from.

Quotes about Dante

Alphabetized by author

Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third. ~ T. S. Eliot

• And you, beloved children, whose lot it is to promote learning under the magisterium of the Church, continue as you are doing to love and tend the noble poet whom We do not hesitate to call the most eloquent singer of the Christian idea.
  • Pope Benedict XV, In Praeclara Summorum (April 30, 1921).

• Dante's relationship with women is very complex, because the range of real women in Dante's life and in Dante Alighieri's imagined life is very different. There is an idealization of women that occurs when he is nine years old. He lost his real mother when he was five years old, so he is the son of a father and a stepmother. The neighbors of the Portinari family had six daughters and one of these is Beatrice, a nine-year-old girl, his age. Dante meets her gaze and from that moment he becomes almost a prisoner of that gaze, which is why nine is Beatrice's magic number, because he meets her at nine years old. The Poet follows her to Florence for another nine years, without ever receiving encouragement from her, until at eighteen, before entering the church where the girl goes every evening in Santa Margherita dei Cerchi which is the Portinari church, suddenly she decides to stop, look at him, smile at him, and says "I greet you" which is the only phrase Dante will hear from Beatrice. Dante remains completely satisfied by this smile and considers it the sealing of a relationship that has had no other type of concretization, nothing else, just this look and this greeting. He tells this story in this wonderful diary which is the Vita Nova, a set of poems and prose writings that he wrote in the aftermath of Beatrice's death.
  • Pupi Avati. As quoted in Giuliana Poli, Pupi Avati: «Dante, un eterno bambino», Avvenire (February 7, 2024)

• Christianity has an admirable example of the natural union between faith and freedom in Dante Alighieri. Precisely his undoubted adherence to Catholic truth allows and illuminates his perfect autonomy of judgement, free from any fear or human conditioning. Dante is not afraid to criticize the work of the popes and their operational choices, to the point of placing several of them in the depths of hell. But in him "the reverence of the supreme keys" never diminishes and never diminishes in the slightest (Inf. XIX, 101). When it comes to expressing reservations or criticisms that he considers due, there are no discounts neither for lay people, nor for ecclesiastics, nor for monarchs, nor for ordinary citizens... all of whom are required, without exception, to abide by the law evangelical.
  • Cardinal Giacomo Biffi. As quoted in Antonio Socci, Il (vero) Dante che non sentite da Benigni, Lo Straniero (March 10, 2015)

• Dante does not come before us as a large catholic mind; rather as a narrow, and even sectarian mind: it is partly the fruit of his age and position, but partly too of his own nature. His greatness has, in all senses, concentred itself into fiery emphasis and depth. He is world-great not because he is world-wide, but because he is world-deep. Through all objects he pierces as it were down into the heart of Being. I know nothing so intense as Dante.
  • Thomas Carlyle, "The Hero as Poet" in Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841).

• Redeth the grete poete of Itaille,
  That highte Dant, for he can al devyse
  Fro point to point, nat o word wol he faille.
  • Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (c. 1390), The Monkes Tale, lines 3650–3652.

• I wanted my illustrations for the Dante to be like the faint markings of moisture in a divine cheese. This explains their variegated aspect of butterflies' wings. Mysticism is cheese; Christ is cheese, better still, mountains of cheese!
  • Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius (1965), p. 195.

• For us Anishinaabe, Biskaabiiyang is a specific term that means “returning to the woods,” because we’re woodland peoples. For example, I grew up growing my “three sisters”—that is, corn, beans, and squash—along the edge of the forest, using what people now call sylvan culture or permaculture. It’s curious how this counters the perspective of classical authors like Dante in early modern Europe or, later, Edmund Spenser, an important Renaissance poet, who view the woods as this terrifying presence. Why is this decolonizing? Because through boarding schools and many other colonial experiences, that fear of the woods creeps in.
  • Grace Dillon "Taking the Fiction Out of Science Fiction: A Conversation about Indigenous Futurisms" (2021)

• Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third.
  • T. S. Eliot, "Dante" (1929).

• Dante as a poet performs miracles in some of the openings of his lyrics or some of his verses in the Commedia. In an age of convention and formalism he went to Virgil to school; in an age when nothing gave reason to hope for the appearance of a masterpiece of form and structure, he produced such a masterpiece. His creative work is immensely superior in merit to his theorizing, but even these show how, in spite of the limitations of contemporary philosophy and rhetoric he was able to slip through the meshes of the network which encircled him, and to bring the vernacular poetry of Italy, when it was still in its infancy, to heights of perfection and finish that have seldom been equalled and never surpassed.
  • Cesare Foligno (1921, Annual Italian Lecture): "Dante: The Poet". Proceedings of the British Academy, 1921–1923 10: 81–96. (quote on p. 96)

• I would like to add my voice to those who consider Dante Alighieri an artist of the greatest universal esteem, who through his immortal works still has much to say and offer to those who desire to travel the way to true knowledge, to the authentic discovery of self, of the world, of life's profound and transcendent meaning. ... The Comedy can be read as a great itinerary, rather as a true pilgrimage, both personal and interior, as well as communal, ecclesial, social and historic. ... Dante is...a prophet of hope, a herald of humanity's possible redemption and liberation, of profound change in every man and woman, of all of humanity.
  • Pope Francis, Message to the President of the Pontifical Council for Culture for the solemn celebration of the 750th anniversary of the birth of the supreme poet Dante Alighieri (4 May 2015).

• Dante was the first to sing of heaven and of hell, not as the dreams of mythological fiction, but as the objects of a real faith. He was the first who lanched from this promontory on which we stand, into the vast immensity of the universe, traversed the abyss amidst demons and infernal tortures, and mounting afterwards through angelic hosts and undiscovered worlds, gazed with stedfast eye upon the glories of the Highest... Dante was the Columbus who discovered this new world of poesy... Dante probably surpassed even Homer himself.
  • Edmund Dorr Griffin, in Remains of the Rev. Edmund D. Griffin (1831), p. 335.

• Dante's corpus as a whole is in certain respects like a testament to the closing medieval age; it shows what the Western world would have been had it not broken from its tradition.
  • René Guénon, Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power (1929), p. 77

• If instilling the fear of hell is a form of “child abuse” perhaps Dante’s “Comedy,” with its graphic depictions of hell, should be forbidden to minors in Japan, and Japanese travel agents should not take families with minors to the famous Medieval Cemetery of Pisa or to countless European cathedrals whose frescos or paintings show how devils will torment the sinners in the afterlife (Buddhist depictions of Cold Hells are not less terrifying, by the way).
  • Massimo Introvigne, "Japan, Pamphlets Against Conservative Religion Distributed in Schools", Bitter Winter (March 8, 2024)

• I love Dante almost as much as the Bible. He is my spiritual food, the rest is ballast.
  • James Joyce, as quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959), p. 226.

• Dante has not deigned to take his inspiration from any other. He has wished to be himself, himself alone; in a word, to create. He has occupied a vast space, and has filled it with the superiority of a sublime mind. He is diverse, strong, and gracious. He has imagination, warmth, and enthusiasm. He makes his reader tremble, shed tears, feel the thrill of honor in a way that is the height of art. Severe and menacing, he has terrible imprecations for crime, scourgings for vice, sorrow for misfortune. As a citizen, affected by the laws of the republic, he thunders against its oppressors, but he is always ready to excuse his native city. Florence is ever to him his sweet, beloved country, dear to his heart. I am envious for my dear France, that she has never produced a rival to Dante; that this Colossus has not had his equal among us. No, there is no reputation which can be compared to his.
  • Napoleon I of France, "Napoleon: In His Own Words" (1916), p. 74.

• Time in culture is capable of many arrangements. Dante read today sets up different relations, very likely, from Dante read in his own decades, but the change is not in Dante nor in his truth, although many will say so. These truths, the truth of the voyage, of the skull-grinding horror, the white chance, leopard, star, and belief, are present. There is no particular question of death, since we are in a life where imaginative experience is given and taken.
  • Muriel Rukeyser The Life of Poetry (1949)

• In The Divine Comedy, Dante reserved a special place in the Seventh Circle of Hell for people who charged usurious interest rates. Today we don't need the hellfire, the pitchforks, or the rivers of boiling blood, but we do need a national usury law that caps interest rates on credit cards and consumer loans at 15 percent.
  • Bernie Sanders Our Revolution (2016)

• His very words are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth, and pregnant with the lightning which has yet found no conductor.
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (1821).

• That great genius conceived, in his vast imagination, the mysteries of the invisible creation, and unveiled them to the eyes of the astonished world.
  • Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi, Historical view of the literature of the south of Europe, translated by Thomas Roscoe, Vol. I (London, 1823), p. 366.

• Dante Alighieri wrote in the fourteenth century that the spirit of poetry abounds "in the tangled constructions and defective pronunciations" of vernacular speech where language is renewed and transformed. His vision resonates today with the faulty speech of migrants creating the sounds and intonations of the future.
  • Cecilia Vicuña The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry (2009)

• Sa réputation s'affermira toujours, parce qu'on ne le lit guère. II y a de lui une vingtaine de traits qu'on sait par cœur: cela suffit pour s'épargner la peine d'examiner le reste.
  • His reputation will last because he is little read. Twenty pointed things in him are known by rote, which spare people the trouble of being acquainted with the remainder.
  • Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, 'Dante' (1765), trans. William F. Fleming.
  • Variant translation: He enjoys an immortal reputation because he is seldom read. Everyone knows by heart some twenty quotations from his writings, and that relieves them of the necessity of examining the remainder.

• Dante's Inferno was the first book to give me a real thrill. I thought Doré's drawings in it remarkable, and I became exceedingly curious about his work.
  • Art Young: His Life and Times (1939)

External links

• Works by Dante Alighieri at Project Gutenberg