Leonardo da Vinci Quotes

367 Sourced Quotes

The motions of men must be such as suggest their dignity or their baseness.

Leonardo da Vinci
He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.

Leonardo da Vinci
There is no certainty in sciences where one of the mathematical sciences cannot be applied, or which are not in relation with these mathematics.

Leonardo da Vinci
Those who fall in love with practice without science are like a sailor who enters a ship without a helm or a compass, and who never can be certain whither he is going.

Leonardo da Vinci
Every quantity is intellectually conceivable as infinitely divisible.

Leonardo da Vinci
Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness; and this truth is in itself so excellent that, even when it dwells on humble and lowly matters, it is still infinitely above uncertainty and lies, disguised in high and lofty discourses; because in our minds, even if lying should be their fifth element, this does not prevent that the truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects, though not of wandering wits. But you who live in dreams are better pleased by the sophistical reasons and frauds of wits in great and uncertain things, than by those reasons which are certain and natural and not so far above us.

Leonardo da Vinci
The worst evil which can befall the artist is that his work should appear good in his own eyes.

Leonardo da Vinci
The air which is struck with most swiftness by the movable thing is compressed to the greatest degree in itself.

Leonardo da Vinci
Men standing in opposite hemispheres will converse and deride each other and embrace each other, and understand each other's language.

Leonardo da Vinci
All bodies together, and each by itself, give off to the surrounding air an infinite number of images which are all-pervading and each complete, each conveying the nature, colour and form of the body which produces it.

Leonardo da Vinci
You know that in an atmosphere of uniform density the most distant things seen through it, such as the mountains, in consequence of the great quantity of atmosphere which is between your eye and them, will appear blue. Therfore you should make the building... wall which is more distant less defined and bluer.... five times as far away make five times as blue.

Leonardo da Vinci
Just as eating against one's will is injurious to health, so studying without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.

Leonardo da Vinci
Do not reveal, if liberty is precious to you; my face is the prison of love.

Leonardo da Vinci
Such as harm is when it hurts me not, is good which avails me not.

Leonardo da Vinci
Shadow is not the absence of light, merely the obstruction of the luminous rays by an opaque body. Shadow is of the nature of darkness. Light is of the nature of a luminous body; one conceals and the other reveals. They are always associated and inseparable from all objects. But shadow is a more powerful agent than light, for it can impede and entirely deprive bodies of their light, while light can never entirely expel shadow from a body, that is from an opaque body.

Leonardo da Vinci
Fame alone raises herself to Heaven, because virtuous things are in favour with God.

Leonardo da Vinci
We, by our arts may be called the grandsons of God.

Leonardo da Vinci
Patience serves us against insults precisely as clothes do against the cold. For if you multiply your garments as the cold increases, that cold cannot hurt you; in the same way increase your patience under great offences, and they cannot hurt your feelings.

Leonardo da Vinci
Necessity is the theme and the inventress, the eternal curb and law of nature.

Leonardo da Vinci
The eye which turns from a white object in the light of the sun and goes into a less fully lighted place will see everything as dark.

Leonardo da Vinci
It is bad if you praise, and worse if you reprove a thing, I mean, if you do not understand the matter well.

Leonardo da Vinci
I ask how far away the eye can discern a non-luminous body, as, for instance, a mountain. It will be very plainly visible if the sun is behind it; and could be seen at a greater or less distance according to the sun's place in the sky.

Leonardo da Vinci
One shall be born from small beginnings which will rapidly become vast. This will respect no created thing, rather will it, by its power, transform almost every thing from its own nature into another.

Leonardo da Vinci
In fact, whatever exists in the universe, in essence, in appearance, in the imagination, the painter has first in his mind and then in his hands... it lies in his power to create them...

Leonardo da Vinci
As a day well spent procures a happy sleep, so a life well employed procures a happy death.

Leonardo da Vinci
The divisions of Perspective are 3, as used in drawing; of these, the first includes the diminution in size of opaque objects; the second treats of the diminution and loss of outline in such opaque objects; the third, of the diminution and loss of colour at long distances.

Leonardo da Vinci
O Time! consumer of all things; O envious age! thou dost destroy all things and devour all things with the relentless teeth of years, little by little in a slow death. Helen, when she looked in her mirror, seeing the withered wrinkles made in her face by old age, wept and wondered why she had twice been carried away.

Leonardo da Vinci
Having wandered some distance among gloomy rocks, I came to the entrance of a great cavern... Two contrary emotions arose in me: fear and desire—fear of the threatening dark cavern, desire to see whether there were any marvelous things in it.

Leonardo da Vinci
Though I may not, like them, be able to quote other authors, I shall rely on that which is much greater and more worthy — on experience, the mistress of their Masters. They go about puffed up and pompous, dressed and decorated with [the fruits], not of their own labours, but of those of others. And they will not allow me my own. They will scorn me as an inventor; but how much more might they — who are not inventors but vaunters and declaimers of the works of others — be blamed.

Leonardo da Vinci
Sculptured figures which appear in motion, will, in their standing position, actually look as if they were falling forward.

Leonardo da Vinci