How Dante Can Save Your Life Quotes

“Be grateful for holiness when you find it among churchmen, but do not expect it. As Flannery O’Connor wrote, “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. Priests resist it as well as others.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“To live is to suffer. To become fully human is to overcome suffering by allowing it to give us wings. Stop thinking about how your struggles are weighing you down, and start thinking, with humility, about how they can lift you up, and make you more compassionate and merciful. Changing your attitude can turn a burden into a blessing.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“It is better to choose to know the painful truth rather than settle on a comforting lie. Resolve to look for and to accept the truth, no matter how much it hurts. Nothing built on lies lasts.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“HOW TO REFUSE DEFEAT Life is fragile and uncertain. Sooner or later, you will experience a great loss in life, when suffering reveals that the world is not the place you think it is, and that your dreams will not come true after all. What then? Don’t blame others for what happened to you, even if it might well be their fault. This is a dead end. And don’t settle for stoic acceptance of your fate. Merely bearing up under strain is noble, but it’s wasting an opportunity for transformation. You have the power to turn your burden into a blessing. What if this pain, this heartbreak, this failure, was given to you to help you find your true self? Make adversity work for you by launching a quest inside your own heart. Find the dragons hiding there, slay them, and bring back the treasure that will help you live well.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“Because we are finite creatures who live in time, we cannot see things clearly. Be careful in judging others because the truth of their character and their situation may be hidden from your eyes. Only God knows the whole truth and only God knows the future. Don't expect all the answers now, but be patient and trusting and seek to grow in love. Each act of love is one more step in the long journey to our true and only home, unity with God in eternity.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“The first part of saving your life is coming to understand how you endangered it by loving wrongly, and living under the rule of your passions.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“In the Commedia, recall, sin consists not only in loving and desiring bad things but also in loving and desiring good things in the wrong way.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“All our troubles, if we carefully seek out their source, derive in some way from not knowing how to make a proper use of time,” says Dante in his Convivio.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“Bibliotherapy”—using books to treat psychological disorders—may be a new trend, but for me, it came naturally.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“Inferno was for learning about the nature of our sins. Purgatorio is for learning how to overcome our tendencies to fall victim to them. Understanding our dilemma is important, but it's not enough. What we do with that understanding makes the difference between life and death. Humility is the foundation of all spiritual progress. Humility builds resilience. Stop thinking of yourself as the center of your world you will find it becomes easier to endure life's setbacks. Plus, you will in time become more grateful, more merciful, and more loving.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“The commentaries on the Commedia also began stacking up at my bedside and on the bookshelf next to my chair in the den. There was Charles Williams’s The Face of Beatrice, Harriet Rubin’s Dante in Love, Yale scholar Giuseppe Mazzotta’s Reading Dante, and later the galleys for English Dantist Prue Shaw’s Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity. Most important of all, I began listening to the Great Courses audio lectures by Bill Cook and Ron Herzman, which made the poem come alive like nothing else.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“If everyone, including himself, loved as they should love, they would love God more than they loved themselves and their passions.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“It is always better to live in truth. However, I was very nearly destroyed. I now knew that I would never be able to return home.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“I’m not denying that what you’re going through is real. What I’m saying is that you need to decide what you believe about memories. They aren’t who you are. They aren’t who you have to be. Even if things like this keep happening, and they likely will, you have to decide how much you will internalize them.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“The thing is, there is nothing wrong with loving your family, your party, your city, and your creed. In fact, there is nobility in Farinata’s character: his love of Florence once saved it from total destruction, and he is honored today by a statue next to the Uffizi Gallery there. The error comes in believing that these are ultimate ends. To let this disorder reign in one’s heart inevitably results in disorder in the family, in the community, in the city, in the country, everywhere—because everything is connected.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“You cannot be both good and neutral, because to refuse desire is to refuse life. The goal is not to remove desire but to purify it.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“I now see clearly that our intellect cannot be satisfied until that truth enlighten it beyond whose boundary no further truth extends. In that truth, like a wild beast in its den, it rests once it has made its way there—and it can do that, or else its every wish would be in vain. —Paradiso IV:124–129”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“Love is not a contractual exchange. Love is given with no expectation of return. Love does not keep a ledger.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“I am responsible for myself. Every time I do the things I shouldn't do or fail to do the things I should do, I sin. The weight of our sins can seem overwhelming, so much so that we feel trapped by them in a dark wood of our own making. What makes it worse is the sense in contemporary culture that sin is either not real or no big deal.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“A wise traveler reaches his goal and rests,” he continues. “The wanderer never reaches it, but with great lethargy of mind forever directs his hungry eyes before him.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“Still, as I have said, accepting that God loved me was something I did only on the level of theory.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“Here was a man who was trapped in a thicket of fear and confusion, powerless to escape. Dante’s verse captured the feeling of my own depression and anxiety precisely. Wild animals blocked the man’s path at every turn. Suddenly the shade of a great poet of antiquity, Virgil, appears before the man and promises to show him the hard road to a good place—but first the man has to trust him.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“I saw—no, I think the word is beheld—the most wondrous thing in the world. This church was indescribably complex and harmonious; it was like stepping into the mind of God. I was overcome by the desire to worship—a feeling I would not see as adequately articulated until many years later, when I would read Dante Alighieri’s description, in his first book, Vita nuova, of the first time he, as a child, saw Beatrice:”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem