“Pride, Envy, and Avarice are
the three sparks that have set these hearts on fire.”
Dante Alighieri book Inferno
Canto VI, lines 74–75 (tr. Sinclair).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Inferno
“Pride, Envy, and Avarice are
the three sparks that have set these hearts on fire.”
Dante Alighieri book Inferno
Canto VI, lines 74–75 (tr. Sinclair).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Inferno
Ivan Illich (1926–2002) austrian philosopher and theologist
We the People interview (1996)
Context: Friendship in the Greek tradition, in the Roman tradition, in the old tradition, was always viewed as the highest point which virtue can reach. Virtue, meaning here, "the habitual facility of doing the good thing," which is fostered by what the Greeks called politaea, political life, community life. I know it was a political life in which I wouldn't have liked to participate, with the slaves around and with the women excluded, but I still have to go to Plato or to Cicero. They conceived of friendship as a supreme flowering, of the interaction which happens in a good political society.
Seneca the Younger book Epistulae morales ad Lucilium
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXVI: On Various Aspects of Virtue
“Life is fired at us point blank.”
José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955) Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist
More context: "To live or to be alive or, what is the same thing, to be a man, does not admit of any preparations or preliminary experiments. Life is fired at us point blank. ... Where and when we are born, or happen to find ourselves after we were born, there and then, like it or not, we must sink or swim."
Man and People [El hombre y la gente] (1957), p. 42, translated by Willard R. Trask. ISBN 0-393-00123-7
Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) English writer
Source: Zuleika Dobson http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/zdbsn11.txt (1911), Ch. IV