Leonardo da Vinci Quotes
Truth is so excellent, that if it praises but small things they become noble.
Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!
Art is never finished, only abandoned.
Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.
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.
The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
Science is the captain, and practice the soldiers.
Virtue is our true wealth and the true reward of its possessor; it cannot be lost, it never deserts us until life leaves us.
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.
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.
He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.
There is no doubt that truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.
Be not false about the past.
All our knowledge is the offspring of our perceptions.
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.
Experience is a truer guide than the words of others.
He who thinks little errs much…
We should not desire the impossible.
One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.
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.
Fear arises sooner than anything else.
O time! swift devourer of all created things!
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.
Where there is most feeling, there is the greatest martyrdom.
If the thing loved is base, the lover becomes base.
As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.
As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.
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.
Faults are more easily recognized in the works of others than in our own.
The grave will fall in upon him who digs it.
The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
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.
Nature appears to have been the cruel stepmother rather than the mother of many animals.
The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.
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.
Darkness is absence of light.
Shadow is diminution of light.
Avoid the precepts of those thinkers whose reasoning is not confirmed by experience.
The motions of men must be such as suggest their dignity or their baseness.
Let no man who is not a Mathematician read the elements of my work.
Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power.
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.
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.
Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.
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.
He who possesses most must be most afraid of loss.
He who sows virtue reaps glory.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Do not reveal, if liberty is precious to you; my face is the prison of love.
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.
In the days of thy youth seek to obtain that which shall compensate the losses of thy old age.
The image of the sun where it falls appears as a thing which covers the person who attempts to cover it.
The point, being indivisible, occupies no space. That which occupies no space is nothing.
He who in reasoning cites authority is making use of his memory rather than of his intellect.
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.
That which has no limitations, has no form.
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.
We are deceived by promises and time disappoints us...
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.
There is no result in nature without a cause; understand the cause and you will have no need of the experiment.
A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
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.
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.
Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than with the imagination being awake?
It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.
Nature never breaks her laws.
Wherever good fortune enters, envy lays siege to the place and attacks it; and when it departs, sorrow and repentance remain behind.
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.
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.
Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past.
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.
Just as courage is the danger of life, so is fear its safeguard.
Supreme happiness will be the greatest cause of misery, and the perfection of wisdom the occassion of folly.
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.
To speak well of a base man is much the same as speaking ill of a good man.
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.
Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.
Not to punish evil is equivalent to authorizing it.
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.
It is ill to praise, and worse to blame, the thing which you do not understand.
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?
Shadow is not the absence of light, merely the obstruction of the luminous rays by an opaque body.
The part always has a tendency to reunite with its whole in order to escape from its imperfection.
Necessity is the theme and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law.
Wisdom is the daughter of experience.
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.
Shadow is the diminution alike of light and of darkness, and stands between darkness and light.
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.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
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.
Reserve the great matters till the end, and the small matters give at the beginning.
That which can be lost cannot be deemed riches.
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.
Our life is made by the death of others.
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.
Tell me if anything was ever done.
