Life & Wisdom Quote by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

Even when Pico seems to compliment an argument, he’s really demoting it. The sentence opens with a gracious nod - “Admittedly great though these reasons be” - then pivots to a controlled dismissal: impressive, yes, but not the “principal grounds.” It’s a classic rhetorical feint: grant your opponent (or your own earlier points) their due, then quietly move the goalposts to a higher, more exclusive standard. The phrase “rightfully claim for themselves” makes admiration sound like a contested title, not a feeling. Pico isn’t describing taste; he’s policing hierarchy.

That matters in Pico’s moment. Writing at the peak of Renaissance humanism, he’s trying to justify a new intellectual confidence: human beings as creatures with an unusual range of freedom, capable of self-fashioning, learning, even spiritual ascent. In the famous architecture of that worldview, there are “reasons” you might admire humanity - ingenuity, eloquence, art, civic achievement - but those are merely the showroom. Pico’s “principal grounds” are metaphysical and moral: the capacity to choose, to transform, to climb the ladder between beast and angel. He’s auditioning a grander basis for dignity than talent or status.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to inherited authority. Medieval rankings (birth, fixed essence, rigid cosmology) can’t monopolize “the highest admiration” if the human subject is defined by becoming rather than being. Pico’s line performs the Renaissance pivot itself: deference on the surface, revolution in the ranking of what deserves awe.