Inferno Love Quotes

Appropriately, Dante’s description of the coming dawn coincides with his reference to Creation. The "Divine Love" alludes to God’s supreme tenderness and devotion in fashioning all the creatures of the earth. And the "things of beauty" refer to the celestial bodies – the sun and stars – that bring light to the universe. With the Genesis comes the dawn of mankind. To further illustrate the birth metaphor, Dante begins his story in the "gentle season," the springtime. Of course, with the sunlight, crafted from God’s all-encompassing love, Dante feels a resurgence of hope, even before the fearsome maw of the lion.

Here, love is like an actual person – given the privilege of capitalized letters and occupying the space of an agent which can urge Beatrice to act in certain ways. This reinforces the concept of love as a moving force, introduced with the concept of God creating the entire universe out of the sheer force of love.

Although it seems counterintuitive, Hell is created out of "the primal love" (or, in other words, God). That a place of such suffering, a realm which urges all souls to "abandon every hope" upon entering, can have a function that stems from love seems absurd. Indeed, Dante’s depiction of the sinners often challenges this assumption. He does not easily accept that an all-loving God would create such excruciating punishments for his favored children.

Francesca, in speaking the language of courtly love, not only personifies love but also exonerates herself and her lover of all guilt. She represents herself as a passive body upon which Love acts, like a god. Here, Love "[takes] hold" of both lovers and "[leads] the two of us unto one death." Francesca repeatedly renders Love as the guilty, sinning force and represents herself as innocent.

In attempting to describe their love, Francesca reveals that her and Paolo’s feelings are nothing more than carnal lust. Their shared activity of reading, which should be a purely intellectual pursuit, becomes an increasingly physical one. First the words lead their gazes to one another, then they imitate the characters’ actions, and finally – in the most blatantly physical representation – Francesca describes the book as a flesh-and-blood person, Gallehault, the man who urged Lancelot to carry on an illicit affair with the queen. All of this results in Francesca and Paolo forgetting their reading in favor of giving in to their lust.

Because God with his infinite love created the universe, his love permeates everything, creating bonds of love between men and the world around them. Fraud, the most heinous type of sin, "cut[s] off / the bond of love that nature forges" because it falsifies man’s (supposedly loving) relationship to the material world around him. Whereas sinners of ordinary fraud like hypocrites, flatterers, and sorcerers generally betray the world around them, sinners of treacherous fraud first establish a particular bond of love with another person and then betray them, making the "special trust" between them "forgotten." Thus, fraud in a very real way is a negation of natural love.

In the circle of sodomy, Dante indirectly addresses this type of sin by showing the inappropriate love that exists between himself and Brunetto Latini, his former teacher. In an unnecessarily intimate manner, Dante considers Latini a "kind, paternal image." But because Dante already has a father figure – namely Virgil – this is inappropriate. Some scholars have also suggested that in writing together or greeting each other, Dante and Latini come into physical contact, which means that Dante puts his hands on his teacher’s aging, naked body.

To complement his stern, lecturing father-figure role, Virgil suddenly shows a spurt of motherly love when he and Dante are pursued by demons. In the comparison of Virgil to a mother bearing her child away from a fire, Virgil grows overprotective of his protégé Dante and "lift[s] her son and run[s] without a stop," instinctively treating his adult charge like a child. In the last line, where Dante describes himself as a "son, and not like a companion," one can hear the hint of pride and love in his voice.

Ulysses’ abandonment of his family is perhaps the most explicit illustration that fraud severs human bonds of love. Despite having braved twenty years of hardship on the open sea to get home, Ulysses quickly forgets his wife Penelope’s devotion, his son’s admiration, and his aging father’s dependence on him. In denying these intimate and tangible ties to life, Ulysses turns to a cold abstract concept of glory. His punishment for forfeiting his family’s love is death and eternal damnation.