Petrarch is known as the father of Humanism and ushered in the era of the Italian Renaissance. This passage is from Petrarch’s Letter to Posterity. It kinda hit home:
My youth was gone before I realized it; I was carried away by the strength of manhood; but a riper age brought me to my senses and taught me by experience the truth I had long before read in books, that youth and pleasure are vanity-nay, that the Author of all ages and times permits us miserable mortals, puffed up with emptiness, thus to wander about, until finally, coming to a tardy consciousness of our sins, we shall learn to know ourselves.
Personally, I would replace the word sin with ignorance.