“The human race is at its best when it is most free.”

Linking human flourishing with freedom and self-determination · Political treatise

• Hope
• Truth

“I intend to say of her what has never been said of any woman.”

Expressing an ambition to honour idealised love through unprecedented praise · Prose memoir

• Beauty
• Love
• Poetry

“The purpose of the whole work is to remove those living in this life from a state of misery and to lead them to a state of happiness.”

Presenting literature as a means of moral and spiritual transformation · Epistle to Cangrande della Scala

• Hope
• Truth

“The vernacular is the language which we learn without any rule, by imitating our nurses.”

Defending the dignity and natural origins of everyday speech · Treatise on language

• Language
• Poetry

“In that part of the book of my memory before which there is little to read, there is a heading which says: Here begins a new life.”

A memorable threshold between remembered experience and a transformed life · Prose memoir

• Memory
• Time