All hope abandon, ye who enter in.

The line is the famous inscription Dante places over the gate of Hell in the Inferno, the first cantica of the Divine Comedy. Written in the early 14th century during Dante Alighieri’s exile from Florence, the poem imagines the pilgrim Dante guided by the Roman poet Virgil through the realms of the afterlife. As they approach the entrance to the underworld, Dante reads the words carved above the threshold, a warning to all who pass inside that Hell is a realm of irrevocable punishment and the loss of any expectation of deliverance.

The inscription announces the moral and spiritual finality of damnation: to enter Hell is to relinquish hope of change, mercy, or escape. In Dante’s theological universe, hope is tied to salvation and the soul’s orientation toward God; its abandonment signals a definitive separation from divine grace. The line also functions dramatically, heightening dread at the threshold and framing the Inferno as a journey into a place where human aspirations and consolations are stripped away. More broadly, it has become a cultural shorthand for any situation perceived as bleak, inescapable, or bureaucratically nightmarish.

Common English renderings include: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here"; "All hope abandon, you who enter"; and Longfellow’s "All hope abandon, ye who enter in!"