Life & Wisdom Quote by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

A young Renaissance aristocrat is smuggling a thunderclap into a pious sentence: you get only a brief window to become yourself, and then the door locks.

Pico della Mirandola, best known for the Oration on the Dignity of Man, is writing at the moment when medieval fixity starts giving way to humanist self-fashioning. The line sounds like orthodox Christian metaphysics (souls, eternity, the afterlife), but its real heat comes from how it re-frames “spiritual beings” as projects with deadlines. “Either from the beginning or soon thereafter” compresses moral development into something like an accelerated adolescence: you may wobble at first, but not for long. The subtext is severe. Freedom is real, but it’s not leisurely; it’s a wager placed early, with permanent stakes.

That tension is why the phrase “for ever and ever” lands like a gavel. Pico isn’t merely preaching; he’s leveraging the era’s hunger for human agency while keeping the Church’s cosmic enforcement mechanism intact. Renaissance optimism, strapped to medieval consequences.

Context matters: Pico is trying to reconcile disparate traditions (Christian theology, Platonism, Aristotelianism, even hints of Kabbalah) into a single vision of human dignity. This line shows the compromise. It grants an almost modern idea of becoming - identity as made, not given - yet insists that becoming ends, hardens, and turns into eternal being. The intent is motivational, even insurgent: you are not born finished, but you will be finished soon.