وإذا ما منعنا الدخان من الرؤية فسيجمعنا السمع بدلاً منها.. - Dante Alighieri

How frozen I became and powerless then, Ask it not, reader, for I write it not, Because all language would be insufficient. I did not die, and I alive remained not. Think for thyself now, hast though ought of wit, What I became, being of both deprived.

Let them cease, then, to insult the Roman empire, who pretend that they are the sons of the Church; when they see that Christ, the bridegroom of the Church, sanctioned the Roman empire at the beginning and at the end of His warfare on earth. And now I think that I have made it sufficiently clear that it was by right that the Romans acquired to themselves the empire of the world.

Oh happy people, oh Ausonia, how glorious hadst thou been, if either he, that weakener of thine empire, had never been born, or if his own pious intention had never deceived him?

O conscience, upright and stainless, how bitter a sting to thee is a little fault!