Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519,) fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, was a prolific Italian painter, sculptor, scientist, engineer, inventor, and polymath. This great Italian Renaissance genius of art and science is often regarded as history’s most creative genius.
The man who painted the celebrated portrait “Mona Lisa” (1504–05) and the renowned mural “The Last Supper” (1498) was a fountainhead of inquiry and creativity in anatomy, mechanics, art, gravity, optics, music, birds, flying machines, geology, weaponry, the human heart. He reached across the disciplines of science, art, humanities, and technology like no one before and few since.
Born in the village of Anchiano near the Tuscan town of Vinci, Leonardo was the illicit son of a Florentine notary and a peasant girl. He apprenticed as a sculptor and painter before he moved to Milan to work for the ruling Sforza family as an engineer, sculptor, painter, and architect. Subsequently, he lived in Florence, Rome, and France.
Leonardo ‘invented’ the bicycle, the airplane, helicopter, and parachute some 500 years before their time. He articulated his science through his art—his scrupulously observed sketches in 3,500 pages of his nineteen notebooks show what he represented, and how he understood the world to work.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Leonardo da Vinci
Truely man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds theirs. We live by the death of others: we are burial places! I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Vegetarianism
Wisdom is the daughter of experience.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Experience, Wisdom
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
Topics: Thinking, Mind, Action, Water
Make your work to be in keeping with your purpose.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Purpose, Goal
Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.
—Leonardo da Vinci
I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand. Why thunder lasts longer than that which causes it, and why immediately on its creation the lightning becomes visible to the eye while thunder requires time to travel. How the various circles of water form around the spot which has been struck by a stone and why a bird sustains itself in the air. These questions and other strange phenomena engaged my thought throughout my life.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Thinking, Thought, Thoughts, Country
When 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
Topics: Dreams, Desires
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
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
—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
Topics: Man, Body, Mankind
Nature is full of infinite causes that have never occurred in experience.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Nature
Art is never finished, only abandoned.
—Leonardo da Vinci
The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Deception
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
Topics: Patience
Three classes of people: Those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Humankind
A good painter is to paint two main things, men and the working of man’s mind.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Painting, Art, Painters
As regards this vice, we read that the peacock is more guilty of it than any other animal. For it is always contemplating the beauty of its tail, which it spreads in the form of a wheel, and by its cries attracts to itself the gaze of the creatures that surround it. And this is the last vice to be conquered.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Vanity
You can never have a greater or a less dominion than over yourself.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Character
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
Topics: Mind, The Mind, Action
You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure what you do not rightly understand.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Praise, Criticism, Censorship
Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Imagination, Eyes, Dreams
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
He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Patience, One liners, Wisdom, Rich, Wishes, Wealth
The greater a man’s soul, the deeper he loves.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Just as courage imperils life; fear protects it.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Fear, Anxiety
Art is the Queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Art
Life well spent is long.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Three classes of people: Those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Humanity
Oh Lord, thou givest us everything, at the price of an effort.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Courage
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
Topics: Relaxation, Work, Leisure, Rest
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