Skip to content

Incorrigible humanity, therefore, led astray by the giant Nimrod, presumed in its heart to outdo in skill not only nature but the source of its own nature, who is God; and began to build a tower in Sennaar, which afterwards was called Babel (that is, 'confusion'). By this means human beings hoped to climb up to heaven, intending in their foolishness not to equal but to excel their creator.

— Dante Alighieri

Another quote →

Topics

More quotes by Dante Alighieri

Love hath so long possessed me for his own
And made his lordship so familiar.

La Vita Nuova (1293)

She is the sum of nature's universe.
To her perfection all of beauty tends.

La Vita Nuova (1293)

The truth thy speech doth show, within my heart reproves the swelling pride.

Purgatorio (1321)

I saw within Its depth how It conceives
all things in a single volume bound by Love,
of which the universe is the scattered leaves.

The Divine Comedy (1308)

Abandon all hope, you who enter here.

The Divine Comedy (1308)

All Dante Alighieri quotes →

You may also like

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.

Buckminster Fuller

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Alfred North Whitehead An Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

John Gilmore

If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man's ethical formation, in man's inner growth, then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.

Pope Benedict XVI

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Dante Alighieri (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.