Inspirational Quotes by Leonardo da Vinci (Italian Polymath)

Inspirational Quotations by Leonardo da Vinci (Italian Polymath)

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

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: Desires, Dreams

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: The Mind, Mind, Action

Necessity is the mistress and guardian of Nature.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Nature, Necessity

When you are alone you are all your own.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Self-Discovery

Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Education

Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Marriage

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

Three classes of people: Those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Humankind

The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Vision

Art is the Queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Art

Wisdom is the daughter of experience.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Experience, Wisdom

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Excellence

Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Value of Time, Time, Time Management

Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Experience

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: Country, Thoughts, Thinking, Thought

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
Topics: Deception/Lying

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

Art is never finished, only abandoned.
—Leonardo da Vinci

Although human subtlety makes a variety of inventions by different means to the same end, it will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple, or more direct than does nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Nature

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure what you do not rightly understand.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Criticism, Censorship, Praise

You can never have a greater or a less dominion than over yourself.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Character

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Happiness, Dying, Death

Intellectual passion drives out sensuality
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Passion

Nothing can be love or hated unless it is first known.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Understanding

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

Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses – especially learn how to see. Realise that everything connects to everything else.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Art

Make your work to be in keeping with your purpose.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Purpose, Goal

I wish to work miracles…
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Action

The great man presides over all his states of consciousness with obstinate rigor.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Life

Three classes of people: Those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Humanity

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, Mankind, Body

It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Beginning

The color of the object illuminated partakes of the color of that which illuminates it.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Knowledge

The greater a man’s soul, the deeper he loves.
—Leonardo da Vinci

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

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: Water, Action, Thinking, Mind

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

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Deception

Wisdom is the daughter of experience.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Experience

One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.
—Leonardo da Vinci