Quote by Petrarch

"You, my friend, by a strange confusion of arguments, try to dissuade me from continuing my chosen work by urging, on the one hand, the hopelessness of bringing my task to completion, and by dwelling, on the other, upon the glory which I have already acquired. Then, after asserting that I have filled the world with my writings, you ask me if I expect to equal the number of volumes written by Origen or Augustine. No one, it seems to me, can hope to equal Augustine. Who, nowadays, could hope to equal one who, in my judgment, was the greatest in an age fertile in great minds? As for Origen, you know that I am wont to value quality rather than quantity, and I should prefer to have produced a very few irreproachable works rather than numberless volumes such as those of Origen, which are filled with grave and intolerable errors."

— Petrarch

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Orators Humanists Poets from Italy Latin authors Historians from Italy

Original Language: English

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Sources

Letter to Giovanni Boccaccio (28 April 1373) as quoted in Petrarch : The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters (1898) edited by James Harvey Robinson and Henry Winchester Rolfe, p. 418

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Petrarch

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Petrarch

Francesco Petrarca (or Petrarch) (July 20, 1304 – July 19, 1374) was an Italian Roman Catholic scholar, poet, and early humanist. Petrarch and Dante are considered the fathers of the Renaissance.

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