Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes 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

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

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.
—Leonardo da Vinci

Envy wounds with false accusations, that is with detraction, a thing which scares virtue.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Envy

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

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: Body, Mankind, Man

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

He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Rich, Patience, Wealth, Wisdom, One liners, Wishes

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, Thought, Thoughts, Thinking

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

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Eyes, Dreams, Imagination

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Wisdom be the Daughter of Experience.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Wisdom

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

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
Topics: Obstacles, Resolve, Endurance, Perseverance

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

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

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

Life well spent is long.
—Leonardo da Vinci

Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Control, Authority

As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: The Mind, Mind

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: Death, Dying, Nature

Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.
—Leonardo da Vinci

Water is the driver of Nature.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Topics: One liners, Water

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

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

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