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
Just as courage imperils life; fear protects it.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Anxiety, Fear
Nature is full of infinite causes that have never occurred in experience.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Nature
He turns not back who is bound to a star.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Endurance, Resolve, Aspirations, Commitment, Dedication, Perseverance, Goals
Every now and then go away, even briefly. Have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer since to remain constantly at work will cause you to lose power.
—Leonardo da Vinci
The color of the object illuminated partakes of the color of that which illuminates it.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Knowledge
Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Time Management, Time, Value of Time
Perspective is the rein and rudder of painting.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Perspective
Envy wounds with false accusations, that is with detraction, a thing which scares virtue.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Envy
To me it seems that those sciences are vain and full of error which are not born of experience, mother of all certainty, first hand experience which in its origins, or means, or end has passed through one of the five senses.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Wisdom
Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Authority, Intelligence
Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Eyes, Imagination, Dreams
Nothing can be love or hated unless it is first known.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Understanding
I wish to work miracles…
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Action
As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: The Mind, Mind
The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Vision
And Wisdom be the Daughter of Experience
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Wisdom
Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.
—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
Topics: Wildlife, Water
As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Death, Dying, Happiness
Three classes of people: Those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Humankind
Art is never finished, only abandoned.
—Leonardo da Vinci
You can never have a greater or a less dominion than over yourself.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Character
The fox when it sees a flock of herons or magpies or birds of that kind, suddenly flings himself on the ground with his mouth open to look as he were dead; and these birds want to peck at his tongue, and he bites off their heads.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Deception/Lying
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
Topics: Life, Living
Water is sometimes sharp and sometimes strong, sometimes acid and sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet and sometimes thick or thin, sometimes it is seen bringing hurt or pestilence, sometime health-giving, sometimes poisonous. It suffers change into as many natures as are the different places through which it passes. And as the mirror changes with the colour of its subject, so it alters with the nature of the place, becoming noisome, laxative, astringent, sulfurous, salty, incarnadined, mournful, raging, angry, red, yellow, green, black, blue, greasy, fat or slim. Sometimes it starts a conflagration, sometimes it extinguishes one; is warm and is cold, carries away or sets down, hollows out or builds up, tears or establishes, fills or empties, raises itself or burrows down, speeds or is still; is the cause at times of life or death, or increase or privation, nourishes at times and at others does the contrary; at times has a tang, at times is without savor, sometimes submerging the valleys with great floods. In time and with water, everything changes.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Water
The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use. But the bee … gathers its materials from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Creativity
Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.
—Leonardo da Vinci
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
He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Patience, Wishes, Rich, One liners, Wisdom, Wealth
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