One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.
—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
And Wisdom be the Daughter of Experience
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Wisdom
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
—Leonardo da Vinci
He turns not back who is bound to a star.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Goals, Perseverance, Aspirations, Commitment, Dedication, Resolve, Endurance
The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Thought, Reason, Pleasure, Understanding
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
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
Art is the Queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Art
Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Time Management, Time, Value of Time
Oh Lord, thou givest us everything, at the price of an effort.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Courage
He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Wisdom, Wishes, Wealth, Rich, Patience, One liners
You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure what you do not rightly understand.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Censorship, Criticism, Praise
Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Intelligence, Authority
The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Deception
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
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
Nature is full of infinite causes that have never occurred in experience.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Nature
Just as iron rusts from disuse, even so does inaction spoil the intellect.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Action, Idleness, Defects, Laziness
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
Life well spent is long.
—Leonardo da Vinci
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 smallest feline is a masterpiece.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Cats
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
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: Rest, Work, Leisure, Relaxation
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
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
Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.
—Leonardo da Vinci
A good painter is to paint two main things, men and the working of man’s mind.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Art, Painters, Painting
The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Vision
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Michelangelo Italian Painter
- Galileo Galilei Italian Astronomer
- Pietro Aretino Italian Author
- Petrarch Italian Scholar
- Thomas Aquinas Italian Catholic Priest
- Dante Alighieri Italian Poet, Philosopher
- Leon Battista Alberti Italian Architect
- Rabindranath Tagore Bengali Poet, Polymath
- Herbert Spencer English Polymath
- William Graham Sumner American Polymath
Leave a Reply