“For in every action what is primarily intended by the doer, whether he acts from natural necessity or out of free will, it is the disclosure of his own image. Hence it comes about that every doer, in so far as he does, takes delight in doing; since everything that is desires its own being, and since in action the being of the doer is somehow intensified, delight necessarily follows... Thus, nothing acts unless [by acting] it makes patent its latent self.”

— Dante Alighieri , book De Monarchia

Libri iii, Caput XIII, (XV.) emendati Johann Heinrich F. Karl Witte (1874) p. 25. https://www.google.com/books/edition/De_monarchia_libri_iii_emendati_per_C_Wi/_RhcAAAAQAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA25&printsec=frontcover Translation as quoted by Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958) p. 175. https://archive.org/details/humancondition0000aren/page/175/mode/1up
De Monarchia (1312-1313)
Original: (la) Nam in omni actione principaliter intenditur ab agente, sive necessitate naturae, sive voluntarie agat, propriam similitudinem explicare, unde fit, quod omne agens, in quantum huiusmodi, delectatur; quia, quum omne quod est appetat suum esse, ac in agendo agentis esse quodammodo amplietur, sequiturde necessitate delectatio... Nihil igitur agit, nisi tale existens, quale patiens fieri debet...

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Dante Alighieri 105

Italian poet 1265–1321

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Dante Alighieri 105

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