“Now it behoves thee thus to free thyself from sloth,” said the Master: “for sitting on down, or under coverlet, men come not into fame;
without which whoso consumes his life, leaves such vestige of himself on earth, as smoke in air or foam in water;
and therefore, rise! conquer thy panting with thy soul, that conquers every battle, if with its heavy body it sinks not down.
A longer ladder must be climbed” (XXIV, lines unnumbered, pg. 132)
— Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, trans. John Aitken Carlyle, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (New York: The Modern Library UP, 1932).