Leonardo da Vinci famous quotes
Last updated: Jul 22, 2024
-
There is nothing which deceives us as much as our own judgement.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
It is ill to praise, and worse to blame, the thing which you do not understand.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
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 -
I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Being willing is not enough. We must do.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Water is the driving force of all nature.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
I awoke, only to see that the rest of the world is still asleep.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Motion is created by the destruction of balance.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
He who does not oppose evil......commands it to be done.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Not to punish evil is equivalent to authorizing it.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
It's easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Our life is made by the death of others.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
The deeper the feeling, the greater the pain
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
Whatever you think matters - doesn't. Follow this rule, and you will add decades to your life. Rodger Rosenblatt As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
It reflects no great honor on a painter to be able to execute only one thing well -- such as a head, an academy figure, or draperies, animals, landscapes, or the like -- in other words, confining himself to some particular object of study. This is so because there is scarcely a person so devoid of genius as to fail of success if he applies himself earnestly to one branch of study and practices it continually.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
-- 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 -
No human investigation can be called real science if it cannot be demonstrated mathematically.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation... even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
Realize that everything connects to everything else.
-- 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 -
Nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first understood.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
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 -
All our knowledge is the offspring of our perceptions.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Nature is full of infinite causes that have never occurred in experience.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
If on your own or by the criticism of others you discover error in your work, correct it then and there; otherwise in exposing your work to the public, you will expose your error also.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
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 -
If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
Where there is most feeling, there is the greatest martyrdom.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
What is fair in men, passes away, but not so in art
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Experience is a truer guide than the words of others.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
An artist's studio should be a small space because small rooms discipline the mind and large ones distract it.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
He turns not back who is bound to a star.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Colour, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
The knowledge of all things is possible
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Art is the queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
He who draws... ought to take his position so that the eye of the figure he is drawing is on a level with his own... because, generally, figures or people whom you meet in the streets all have their eyes at the same level as yours, and if you make them higher or lower you will find that your portrait will not resemble them.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
Just as iron which is not used grows rusty, and water putrefies and freezes in the cold, so the mind of which no use is made is spoilt.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Drawing is based upon perspective, which is nothing else than a thorough knowledge of the function of the eye.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
In life beauty perishes, but not in art.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
Reprove your friend in secret and praise him openly.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
When you put your hand in a flowing stream, you touch the last that has gone before and the first of what is still to come.
-- 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 -
One day the world will look upon research upon animals as it now looks upon research on human beings.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
In time and with water, everything changes.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Just as eating against one's will is injurious to health, so studying without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Feathers shall raise men even as they do birds towards heaven :- That is by letters written with their quills.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
A good painter has two main objects to paint, man and the intention of his soul.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
You should prefer a good scientist without literary abilities than a literate one without scientific skills
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Obstacles cannot bend me. Every obstacle yields to effort.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
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 -
-
A good painter has two main objects to paint, man and the intention of his soul. The former is easy, the latter hard as he has to represent it by the attitude and movement of the limbs.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
And you who wish to represent by words the form of man and all the aspects of his membrification, relinquish that idea. For the more minutely you describe the more you will confine the mind of the reader, and the more you will keep him from the knowledge of the thing described. And so it is necessary to draw and to describe.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Love shows itself more in adversitythan in prosperity; as light does, which shines most where the place isdarkest.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
You should often amuse yourself when you take a walk for recreation, in watching and taking note of the attitudes and actions of men as they talk and dispute, or laugh or come to blows with one another... noting these down with rapid strokes, in a little pocket-book which you ought always to carry with you.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Beauty perishes in life, but is immortal in art.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Do not reveal, if liberty is precious to you; my face is the prison of love.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
That painter who has no doubts will achieve little.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Intellectual passion dries out sensuality.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
The greatest geniuses sometimes accomplish more when they work less.
-- 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 with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Small rooms or dwellings discipline the mind, large ones weaken it.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Look at light and admire its beauty. Close your eyes, and then look again: what you saw is no longer there; and what you will see later is not yet.
-- 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 -
-
While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Oysters open completely when the moon is full; and when the crab sees one it throws a piece of stone or seaweed into it and the oyster cannot close again so that it serves the crab for meat. Such is the fate of him who opens his mouth too much and thereby puts himself at the mercy of the listener.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
Just as food eaten without appetite is a tedious nourishment, so does study without zeal damage the memory by not assimilating what it absorbs.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
-
I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
The discovery of a good wine is increasingly better for mankind than the discovery of a new star.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Intellectual passion drives out sensuality.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
You may also like:
-
Albert Einstein
Theoretical Physicist -
Albrecht Durer
Artist -
Aristotle
Philosopher -
Claude Monet
Painter -
Galileo Galilei
Physicist -
Giorgio Vasari
Painter -
Isaac Newton
Physicist -
Leonardo DiCaprio
Actor -
Michelangelo
Sculptor -
Niccolo Machiavelli
Historian -
Nicolaus Copernicus
Mathematician -
Pablo Picasso
Painter -
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Artist -
Raphael
Painter -
Rembrandt
Painter -
Salvador Dali
Painter -
Thomas A. Edison
Inventor -
Titian
Painter -
Vincent Van Gogh
Painter -
William Shakespeare
Poet
