Top 100 Leonardo Da Vinci Quotes
#1. O sleepers! what a thing is slumber! Sleep resembles death. Ah, why then dost thou not work in such wise as that after death thou mayst retain a resemblance to perfect life, when, during life, thou art in sleep so like to the hapless dead?
Leonardo Da Vinci
#3. First study the science, and then practice the art which is born of that science.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#4. All the bystanders at an event worthy of note adopt various gestures of admiration when contemplating the occurrence.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#5. Given the cause nature produces the effect in the briefest manner that it can employ.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#6. It is no small benefit on finding oneself in bed in the dark to go over again in the imagination the main lines of the forms previously studied, or other noteworthy things conceived by ingenious speculation.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#7. The painter who has no doubt about his own ability will attain very little.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#8. If you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. Let us hope that.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#10. I have solved what color is, however ; I still have no idea about what line is.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#11. Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#12. He who has access to the fountain does not go to the water-pot.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#13. Although a man be not a painter, he may have just opinions of the forms of men.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#16. The soul is content to stay imprisoned in the human body ... for through the eyes all the various things of nature are represented to the soul.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#17. A deaf and dumb person who sees two men in conversation - may nevertheless understand from the attitudes and gestures of the speakers, how well their discussion is getting along.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#18. No counsel is more sincere than that given on ships which are in danger.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#19. The senses are of the earth, the reason stands apart from them in contemplation.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#20. Weight is caused by one element being situated in another; and it moves by the shortest line towards its centre, not by its own choice, not because the centre draws it to itself, but because the other intervening element cannot withstand it.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#21. When the fig-tree stood without fruit no one looked at it. Wishing by producing this fruit be praised by men, it was bent and broken by them.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#22. Mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences because by means of it one comes to the fruits of mathematics.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#23. Men standing in opposite hemispheres will converse and deride each other and embrace each other, and understand each other's language.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#24. The first of all single colors is white ... We shall set down white for the representative of light, without which no color can be seen; yellow for the earth; green for water; blue for air; red for fire; and black for total darkness.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#26. Men and words are ready made, and you, O Painter, if you do not know how to make your figures move, are like an orator who knows not how to use his words.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#27. He who despises painting has no love for the philosophy in nature.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#28. The eye, the window of the soul, is the chief means whereby the understanding can most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of Nature; and the ear is second.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#29. Sculptured figures which appear in motion, will, in their standing position, actually look as if they were falling forward.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#31. The human bird shall take his first flight, filling the world with amazement, all writings with his fame, and bringing eternal glory to the nest whence he sprang.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#32. The mole has very small eyes and it always lives under ground; and it lives as long as it is in the dark but when it comes into the light it dies immediately, because it becomes known;
and so it is with lies.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#33. Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#37. The love of anything is the offspring of knowledge, love being more fervent in proportion as knowledge is more certain. And this certainty springs from a complete knowledge of all parts which united compose the whole of the thing which out to be loved.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#38. O speculators about perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you created in the like quest? Go and take your place with the seekers after gold.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#39. 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
#42. You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#43. It is as great an error to speak well of a worthless man as to speak ill of a good man.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#48. The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#49. When that which loves is united to the thing beloved it can rest there; when the burden is laid down it finds rest there. There will be eternal fame also for the inhabitants of that town, constructed and enlarged by him.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#51. There shall be wings! If the accomplishment be not for me, 'tis for some other. The spirit cannot die; and man, who shall know all and shall have wings.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#53. For in truth great love is born of great knowledge of the thing loved.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#54. Be a mirror, absorb everything around you and still remain the same
Leonardo Da Vinci
#55. If a man has a tent made of linen of which the apertures have all been stopped up, and be it twelve bracchia across (over twenty-five feet) and twelve in depth, he will be able to throw himself down from any height without sustaining injury. [His concept of the parachute.]
Leonardo Da Vinci
#56. Fire is to represent truth because it destroys all sophistry and lies; and the mask is for lying and falsehood which conceal truth.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#60. The painter's mind is a copy of the divine mind, since it operates freely in creating the many kinds of animals, plants, fruits, landscapes, countrysides, ruins, and awe-inspiring places.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#61. The lover is moved by the thing loved, as the sense is by that which perceives, and it unites with it and they become one and the same thing ... when the lover is united with the beloved it finds rest there; when the burden is laid down there it finds rest.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#62. As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#64. What induces you, oh man, to depart from your home in town, to leave parents and friends, and go to the countryside over mountains and valleys, if it is not for the beauty of the world of nature?
Leonardo Da Vinci
#65. Practice should always be based upon a sound knowledge of theory.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#66. Nature is constrained by the cause of her laws which dwell inborn in her. Variant: Nature is constrained by the order of her own law which lives and works within her.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#67. O mighty and once living instrument of formative nature. Incapable of availing thyself of thy vast strength thou hast to abandon a life of stillness and to obey the law which God and time gave to procreative nature.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#68. I have discovered that a screw-shaped device such as this, if it is well made from starched linen, will rise in the air if turned quickly.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#69. 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
#70. For those colours which you wish to be beautiful, always first prepare a pure white ground.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#71. The merit of painting lies in the exactness of reproduction. Painting is a science and all sciences are based on mathematics. No human inquiry can be a science unless it pursues its path through mathematical exposition and demonstration.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#72. Do not imitate one another's style. If you do, so far as your art is concerned you will be called a grandson, rather than the son of Nature.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#73. Once you have tasted the taste of sky, you will forever look up
Leonardo Da Vinci
#75. The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#80. The mind of a painter should be like a mirror which is filled with as many images as there are things placed before him.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#81. One has no right to love or hate anything if one has not acquired a thorough knowledge of its nature. Great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you know it but little you will be able to love it only a little or not at all.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#82. It is a far worthier thing to read by the light of experience than to adorn oneself with the labors of others.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#83. Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#85. Shadows which you see with difficulty, and whose boundaries you cannot define ... these you should not represent as finished or sharply defined, for the result would be that your work would seem wooden.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#86. If you are representing a white body let it be surrounded by ample space, because as white has no colour of its own, it is tinged and altered in some degree by the colour of the objects surrounding it
Leonardo Da Vinci
#89. If you find from your own experience that something is a fact and it contradicts what some authority has written down, then you must abandon the authority and base your reasoning on your own findings.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#90. Fire destroys all sophistry, that is deceit; and maintains truth alone, that is gold.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#91. Drawing is based upon perspective, which is nothing else than a thorough knowledge of the function of the eye.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#92. There is no higher or lower knowledge, but one only, flowing out of experimentation.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#94. An arch consists of two weaknesses which, leaning one against the other, make a strength.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#95. It reflects no great honour on a painter to be able to execute one thing well.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#96. Small rooms and dwellings set the mind on the right path, large ones cause it to go astray.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#97. If you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry blind painting.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#98. Depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#99. Experiment is the sole interpreter of the artifices of Nature.
Leonardo Da Vinci
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