Leonardo da Vinci Quotes

Leonardo da Vinci Quote: Truth is so excellent, that if it praises but small things they become noble.

Truth is so excellent, that if it praises but small things they become noble.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes! 

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Art is never finished, only abandoned. 

Leonardo da Vinci

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

Leonardo da Vinci

The soul can never be corrupted with the corruption of the body, but it is like the wind which causes the sound of the organ, and which ceases to produce a good effect when a pipe is spoilt.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

Leonardo da Vinci

Science is the captain, and practice the soldiers.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Virtue is our true wealth and the true reward of its possessor; it cannot be lost, it never deserts us until life leaves us.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

O Time! consumer of all things; O envious age! thou dost destroy all things and devour all things with the relentless teeth of years, little by little in a slow death.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Here is a thing which the more it is needed the more it is rejected: and this is advice, which is unwillingly heeded by those who most need it, that is to say, by the ignorant.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)



He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

There is no doubt that truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

Be not false about the past.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

All our knowledge is the offspring of our perceptions.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

The acquisition of any knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it may thus drive out useless things and retain the good. For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Experience is a truer guide than the words of others.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

He who thinks little errs much…

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

Leonardo da Vinci Quote: We should not desire the impossible.

We should not desire the impossible.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself. 

Leonardo da Vinci

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence as I said before with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Fear arises sooner than anything else.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

O time! swift devourer of all created things!

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Men wrongly lament the flight of time, blaming it for being too swift; they do not perceive that its passage is sufficiently long, but a good memory, which nature has given to us, causes things long past to seem present.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

Where there is most feeling, there is the greatest martyrdom.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

If the thing loved is base, the lover becomes base.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

Leonardo da Vinci Quote: As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Nature is a source of truth. Experience does not ever err, it is only your judgment that errs in promising itself results which are not caused by your experiments.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Faults are more easily recognized in the works of others than in our own.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

The grave will fall in upon him who digs it.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci - XIX)

The painter's work will be of little merit if he takes the painting of others as his standard, but if he studies from nature he will produce good fruits.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

Leonardo da Vinci Quote: Nature appears to have been the cruel stepmother rather than the mother of many animals.

Nature appears to have been the cruel stepmother rather than the mother of many animals.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

There is no human experience that can be termed true science unless it can be mathematically demonstrated. And if thou sayest that the sciences which begin and end in the mind are true, this cannot be conceded, but must be denied for many reasons, and firstly because in such mental discourses experience is eliminated, and without experience there can be no certainty.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

Darkness is absence of light.
Shadow is diminution of light.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Avoid the precepts of those thinkers whose reasoning is not confirmed by experience.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

The motions of men must be such as suggest their dignity or their baseness.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Let no man who is not a Mathematician read the elements of my work.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power. 

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

In the first place, sculpture is dependent on certain lights, namely those from above, while a picture carries everywhere with it its own light and shade; light and shade therefore are essential to sculpture. In this respect, the sculptor is aided by the nature of the relief, which produces these of its own accord, but the painter artificially creates them by art in places where nature would normally do the like. The sculptor cannot render the difference in the varying natures of the colors of objects; painting does not fail to do so in any particular. The lines of perspective of sculptors do not seem in any way true; those of painters may appear to extend a hundred miles beyond the work itself. The effects of aerial perspective are outside the scope of sculptors' work; they can neither represent transparent bodies nor luminous bodies nor angles of reflection nor shining bodies such as mirrors and like things of glittering surface, nor mists, nor dull weather, nor an infinite number of things which I forbear to mention lest they should prove wearisome.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

He who possesses most must be most afraid of loss.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

He who sows virtue reaps glory.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

A bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law, which instrument it is within the capacity of man to reproduce with all its movements.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Experience, the interpreter between creative nature and the human race, teaches the action of nature among mortals: how under the constraint of necessity she cannot act otherwise than as reason, who steers her helm, teaches her to act.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

The eye which turns from a white object in the light of the sun and goes into a less fully lighted place will see everything as dark. (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Leonardo da Vinci

Represent your figures in such action as may be fitted to express what purpose is in the mind of each; otherwise your art will not be admirable.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Do not reveal, if liberty is precious to you; my face is the prison of love.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Though I may not, like them, be able to quote other authors, I shall rely on that which is much greater and more worthy - on experience, the mistress of their Masters.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

In the days of thy youth seek to obtain that which shall compensate the losses of thy old age.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

The image of the sun where it falls appears as a thing which covers the person who attempts to cover it.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

The point, being indivisible, occupies no space. That which occupies no space is nothing.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

He who in reasoning cites authority is making use of his memory rather than of his intellect.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

Those men who are inventors and interpreters between Nature and Man, as compared with boasters and declaimers of the works of others, must be regarded and not otherwise esteemed than as the object in front of a mirror, when compared with its image seen in the mirror.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

That which has no limitations, has no form.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

One shall be born from small beginnings which will rapidly become vast. This will respect no created thing, rather will it, by its power, transform almost every thing from its own nature into another.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci - Of Fire)

We are deceived by promises and time disappoints us...

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Truth at last cannot be hidden. Dissimulation is of no avail. Dissimulation is to no purpose before so great a judge. Falsehood puts on a mask. Nothing is hidden under the sun.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

There is no result in nature without a cause; understand the cause and you will have no need of the experiment.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.

Leonardo da Vinci

Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast. 

Leonardo da Vinci

Experience is never at fault; it is only your judgment that is in error in promising itself such results from experience as are not caused by our experiments. For having given a beginning, what follows from it must necessarily be a natural development of such a beginning, unless it has been subject to a contrary influence, while, if it is affected by any contrary influence, the result which ought to follow from the aforesaid beginning will be found to partake of this contrary influence in a greater or less degree in proportion as the said influence is more or less powerful than the aforesaid beginning.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than with the imagination being awake?

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Nature never breaks her laws.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

Wherever good fortune enters, envy lays siege to the place and attacks it; and when it departs, sorrow and repentance remain behind.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Every loss which we incur leaves behind it vexation in the memory, save the greatest loss of all, that is, death, which annihilates the memory, together with life.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

All bodies together, and each by itself, give off to the surrounding air an infinite number of images which are all-pervading and each complete, each conveying the nature, colour and form of the body which produces it.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Amid the vastness of the things among which we live, the existence of nothingness holds the first place; its function extends over all things that have no existence, and its essence, as regards time, lies precisely between the past and the future, and has nothing in the present.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Just as courage is the danger of life, so is fear its safeguard.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

Supreme happiness will be the greatest cause of misery, and the perfection of wisdom the occassion of folly.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

We see the most striking example of humility in the lamb which will submit to any animal; and when they are given for food to imprisoned lions they are as gentle to them as to their own mother, so that very often it has been seen that the lions forbear to kill them.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

To speak well of a base man is much the same as speaking ill of a good man.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.

Leonardo da Vinci

Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Not to punish evil is equivalent to authorizing it.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

It is ordained that to the ambitious, who derive no satisfaction from the gifts of life and the beauty of the world, life shall be a cause of suffering, and they shall possess neither the profit nor the beauty of the world.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

It is ill to praise, and worse to blame, the thing which you do not understand.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

Why are the bones of great fishes, and oysters and corals and various other shells and sea-snails, found on the high tops of mountains that border the sea, in the same way in which they are found in the depths of the sea? 

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Shadow is not the absence of light, merely the obstruction of the luminous rays by an opaque body.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

The part always has a tendency to reunite with its whole in order to escape from its imperfection.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Necessity is the theme and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Wisdom is the daughter of experience.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

Shadow is the diminution alike of light and of darkness, and stands between darkness and light.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

The Caladrius is a bird of which it is related that, when it is carried into the presence of a sick person, if the sick man is going to die, the bird turns away its head and never looks at him; but if the sick man is to be saved the bird never loses sight of him but is the cause of curing him of all his sickness. Like unto this is the love of virtue. It never looks at any vile or base thing, but rather clings always to pure and virtuous things and takes up its abode in a noble heart; as the birds do in green woods on flowery branches. And this Love shows itself more in adversity than in prosperity; as light does, which shines most where the place is darkest.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

Nature being capricious and taking pleasure in creating and producing a continuous sucession of lives and forms because she knows that they serve to increase her terrestrial substance, is more ready and swift in her creating than time is in destroying, and therefore she has ordained that many animals shall serve as food one for the other; and as this does not satisfy her desire she sends forth frequently certain noisome and pestilential vapours and continual plagues upon the vast accumulations and herds of animals and especially upon human beings who increase very rapidly because other animals do not feed upon them.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Reserve the great matters till the end, and the small matters give at the beginning.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

That which can be lost cannot be deemed riches.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

There is no doubt that truth is to falsehood as light is to darkness; and so excellent a thing is truth that even when it touches humble and lowly matters, it still incomparably exceeds the uncertainty and falsehood in which great and elevated discourses are clothed; because even if falsehood be the fifth element of our minds, notwithstanding this, truth is the supreme nourishment of the higher intellects.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

Our life is made by the death of others. 

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci)

Although human ingenuity may devise various inventions which, by the help of various instruments, answer to one and the same purpose, yet will it never discover any inventions more beautiful, more simple or more practical than those of nature.

Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)

Tell me if anything was ever done.

Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci - This was written in his notebooks in despair of so many of his projects that never were completed)

Leonardo da Vinci Biography

Born: April 15, 1452
Died: May 2, 1519

Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian polymath. He is best known for his amazing sets of skills in various fields. One of the greatest painters of all time and also immensly praised for everything else he had done.

Notable Works

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
Thoughts on Art and Life

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