Quotes by Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri wrote the Divine Comedy, in three parts (Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso), after being exiled from Florence. He died in Ravenna in 1321. The wording here is Henry Francis Cary’s English translation, whose complete edition appeared in 1814.
Call to mind from whence we sprang: / Ye were not form’d to live the life of brutes / But virtue to pursue and knowledge high.
In the midway of this our mortal life, / I found me in a gloomy wood, astray / Gone from the path direct:
Love, that denial takes from none belov’d, / Caught me with pleasing him so passing well, / That, as thou see’st, he yet deserts me not.