Don Palmer

“Eros is often our salvation from a false agape, as agape is from tyrannical eros. Redemption is everywhere exchanged.”
― Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante

“While the past is lost for ever, everything that didn’t happen in it is doubly lost. This creates a particular kind of feeling of loss, the melancholy of an unrealized past.”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“The chief business of man is at any moment to be realizing his powers of intellectual apprehension—to understand, to the utmost of his capacity, things as they are.”
― Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante

“What then are those fruits? They are, according to Aristotle, eleven; they are: (1) Courage—which controls rashness and timidity. (2) Temperance—which controls indulgence and abstinence. (3) Liberality—which controls giving and receiving. (4) Magnificence—which incurs and limits great expense. (5) Magnanimity—which moderates and acquires honour and reputation. (6) Love of honour—which moderates and orders us as regards this world’s honours. (7) Mansuetude—which moderates our anger and our overmuch patience with external evils. (8) Affability—which makes us ‘con-vivial’ or companionable with others. (9) Truthfulness—which prevents us in our talk from pretending to be more or less than we are. (10) Pleasantness (eutrapelia)—which sets us free to make a proper and easy use of amusement (‘sollazia’—solace). (11) Justice—which constrains us to love and practise directness in all things. These are the eleven virtues of largesse; these are the powers which are provoked into action by the girl’s challenge, because they are the ‘valore’ of a man. It is indeed these which Beatrice, consciously or unconsciously, encourages, and in which she takes delight.”
― Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante