A Man After My Own Heart

"this is to be a collection without order, taken from many papers which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place, according to the subjects of which they may treat. But I believe that before I am at the end of this I shall have to repeat the same things several times; for which, O reader! do not blame me, for the subjects are many and memory cannot retain them and say: 'I will not write this because I wrote it before.' And if I wished to avoid falling into this fault, it would be necessary in every case when I wanted to copy that, not to repeat myself, I should read over all that had gone before; and all the more since the intervals are long between one time of writing and the next."

"I know that many will call this useless work; and they will be those of whom Demetrius 8 declared that he took no more account of the wind that came out their mouth in words, than of that they expelled from their lower parts: men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of that of wisdom, which is the food and the only true riches of the mind. For so much more worthy as the soul is than the body, so much more noble are the possessions of the soul than those of the body. And often, when I see one of these men take this work in his hand, I wonder that he does not put it to his nose, like a monkey, or ask me if it is something good to eat."

~Leonardo Da Vinci