They had their faces twisted toward their haunches and found it necessary to walk backward, because they could not see ahead of them. ...And since he wanted so to see ahead, he looks behind and walks a backward path.

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 here were every fruit and never-ending spring; these streams--the nectar of which poets sing.

And here Dante describes an evidently spherical world... "The lamp of the world [the sun] rises to mortals through different passages; but through that which joins four circles with three crosses [the position of the rising sun at the vernal equinox] it issues with a better course and conjoined with better stars, and tempers and stamps the wax of the world more after its own fashion. Although such an outlet had made morning there and evening here, and all the hemisphere there was bright, and the other dark..."

e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle" ("and thence we came forth to see again the stars")

Will cannot be quenched against its will.

There is no greater pain than to remember, in our present grief, past happiness.

If you follow your natural bent;you will definitely go to heaven