Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

"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."

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

"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."

"There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery"