The Vanity of Glory

From The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory (1320), by Dante Aligheri, translated by Charles Eliot Norton in 1892.

Worldly renown is naught but a breath of wind, which now comes hence and now comes thence, and changes name because it changes quarter. What more fame shalt thou have, if thou strippest old flesh from thee, than if thou hadst died ere thou hadst left the pap and the chink, before a thousand years have passed?–which is a shorter space compared to the eternal than a movement of the eyelids to the circle that is slowest turned in Heaven.