“This much will I say for myself — and on this point I do not blush for praising myself — that I have never philosophized save for the sake of philosophy, nor have I ever desired or hoped to secure from my studies and my laborious researches any profit or fruit save cultivation of mind and knowledge of the truth — things I esteem more and more with the passage of time. I have also been so avid for this knowledge and so enamored of it that I have set aside all private and public concerns to devote myself completely to contemplation; and from it no calumny of jealous persons, nor any invective from enemies of wisdom has ever been able to detach me.”

— Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, book Oration on the Dignity of Man

25. 158-159; translation by A. Robert Caponigri
Oration on the Dignity of Man (1496)

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Giovanni Pico della Mirandola7

humanist and philosopher from Italy 1463–1494

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Giovanni Pico della Mirandola7

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