Dante Alighieri Quotes Proverbs, and Aphorisms
- c. 1265 – September 14, 1321
- Italian
- Poet, Writer, Philosopher, Author of The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri was a 13th–14th century Italian poet, philosopher, and political thinker, best known for his monumental epic poem, The Divine Comedy. Written in vernacular Italian rather than Latin, the work—comprising Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—charts a symbolic journey through the afterlife and reflects Dante’s vision of divine justice, moral redemption, and spiritual salvation. It also serves as a profound commentary on politics, theology, and human nature. Often called the “father of the Italian language,” Dante helped shape literary tradition and national identity. Though exiled from his native Florence, his legacy endures as one of the greatest poets of Western literature and a towering figure of the medieval intellectual world.
- “Beauty awakens the soul to act.”
- “Follow your own star!”
- “Consider your origins: you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.”
- “At this high moment, ability failed my capacity to describe.”
- “If the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.”
- “The sad souls of those who lived without blame and without praise.”
- “Nature is the art of God.”
- “The customs and fashions of men change like leaves on the bough, some of which go and others come.”
- “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.”
- “I love to doubt as well as know.”
- “I wept not, so to stone within I grew.”
- “Heat cannot be separated from fire, or beauty from The Eternal.”
- “O conscience, upright and stainless, how bitter a sting to thee is a little fault!”
- “Be as a tower firmly set; Shakes not its top for any blast that blows.”
- “There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.”
- “The secret of getting things done is to act!”
- “Remember tonight… for it is the beginning of always.”
- “Will cannot be quenched against its will.”
- “Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground.”
- “A mighty flame followeth a tiny spark.”
- “In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.”
- “The more perfect a thing is, the more susceptible to good and bad treatment it is.”
- “All hope abandon, ye who enter here!”
- “Worldly fame is but a breath of wind that blows now this way, and now that, and changes name as it changes direction.”
- “Small projects need much more help than great.”
- “From a little spark may burst a flame.”
- “No one thinks of how much blood it costs.”
- “He listens well who takes notes.”
- “Pride, envy, avarice — these are the sparks have set on fire the hearts of all men.”
- “Art, as far as it is able, follows nature, as a pupil imitates his master; thus your art must be, as it were, God’s grandchild.”
- “You shall find out how salt is the taste of another man’s bread, and how hard is the way up and down another man’s stairs.”