Leonardo da Vinci quotes:

I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but they whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue their principles unto death.

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

Human subtlety 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.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

I have found that, in the composition of the human body as compared with the bodies of animals, the organs of sense are duller and coarser. Thus, it is composed of less ingenious instruments, and of spaces less capacious for receiving the faculties of sense.

Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Colour, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest.

Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.

Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.

The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.

Water is the driving force of all nature.

A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.

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.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Many are they who have a taste and love for drawing, but no talent; and this will be discernible in boys who are not diligent and never finish their drawings with shading.

Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.

To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another; and not only among the plants, but among the boughs, the leaves and the fruits, you will not find one which is exactly similar to another.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

The human bird shall take his first flight, filling the world with amazement, all writings with his fame, and bringing eternal glory to the nest whence he sprang.

In order to arrive at knowledge of the motions of birds in the air, it is first necessary to acquire knowledge of the winds, which we will prove by the motions of water in itself, and this knowledge will be a step enabling us to arrive at the knowledge of beings that fly between the air and the wind.

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature. Necessity is the theme and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law.

There is no object so large but that at a great distance from the eye it does not appear smaller than a smaller object near.

The length of a man's outspread arms is equal to his height.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament and food of the mind of man.

The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

For, verily, great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it, you will be able to love it only little or not at all.

Nature never breaks her own laws.

Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

Our body is dependant on Heaven and Heaven on the Spirit.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

There are four Powers: memory and intellect, desire and covetousness. The two first are mental and the others sensual. The three senses: sight, hearing and smell cannot well be prevented; touch and taste not at all.

Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!

Weight, force and casual impulse, together with resistance, are the four external powers in which all the visible actions of mortals have their being and their end.

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.

Tears come from the heart and not from the brain.

Each man is always in the middle of the surface of the earth and under the zenith of his own hemisphere, and over the centre of the earth.

Life well spent is long.

The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.

For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.

Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation... even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

I have always felt it is my destiny to build a machine that would allow man to fly.

Learning never exhausts the mind.

Our life is made by the death of others.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.

Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.

If a man has a tent made of linen of which the apertures have all been stopped up, and be it twelve bracchia across (over twenty-five feet) and twelve in depth, he will be able to throw himself down from any height without sustaining injury. [His concept of the parachute.]

Learn diligence before speedy execution.

Not to appreciate life, all of life, is not to deserve it.

The Bactrian have two humps; the Arabian one only. They are swift in battle and most useful to carry burdens. This animal is extremely observant of rule and measure, for it will not move if it has a greater weight than it is used to, and if it is taken too far it does the same, and suddenly stops and so the merchants are obliged to lodge there.

Wisdom is the daughter of experience

People of higher talent work, even if they seem to do nothing

The good painter must paint two things: a person and the essence of his soul.

Wood feeds the fire which burns it.

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

Make your faces so that they do not all have the same expression, as one sees with most painters, but give them different expression, according to age, complexion, and good or bad character.

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.

Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold.

In life beauty perishes, but not in art.

It is ordained that to the ambitious, who derive no satisfaction from the gifts of life and the beauty of the world, life shall be a cause of suffering, and they shall possess neither the profit nor the beauty of the world.

Many will think they may reasonably blame me by alleging that my proofs are opposed to the authority of certain men held in the highest reverence by their inexperienced judgments; not considering that my works are the issue of pure and simple experience.

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. Therefore you should make the building... wall which is more distant less defined and bluer... five times as far away, make five times as blue.

Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places.

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.

O speculators about perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you created in the like quest? Go and take your place with the seekers after gold.

Those who are enamoured of practice without science are like a pilot who goes into a ship without rudder or compass and never has any certainty of where he is going. Practice should always be based upon a sound knowledge of theory.

Men born in hot countries love the night because it refreshes them and have a horror of light because it burns them.

I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand.

Oysters open completely when the moon is full; and when the crab sees one it throws a piece of stone or seaweed into it and the oyster cannot close again so that it serves the crab for meat. Such is the fate of him who opens his mouth too much and thereby puts himself at the mercy of the listener.

A deaf and dumb person who sees two men in conversation - may nevertheless understand from the attitudes and gestures of the speakers, how well their discussion is getting along.

One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.

Medicine is the restoration of discordant elements; sickness is the discord of the elements infused into the living body.

You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.

The painter or draftsman ought to be solitary, in order that the well-being of the body not sap the vigour of the mind.

Being willing is not enough. We must do.

The merit of painting lies in the exactness of reproduction. Painting is a science and all sciences are based on mathematics. No human inquiry can be a science unless it pursues its path through mathematical exposition and demonstration.

Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power.

Envy wounds with false accusations, that is with detraction, a thing which scares virtue.

The smallest feline is a masterpiece.

There is no doubt that truth is to falsehood as light is to darkness; and so excellent a thing is truth that even when it touches humble and lowly matters, it still incomparably exceeds the uncertainty and falsehood in which great and elevated discourses are clothed; because even if falsehood be the fifth element of our minds, notwithstanding this, truth is the supreme nourishment of the higher intellects.

It is no small benefit on finding oneself in bed in the dark to go over again in the imagination the main lines of the forms previously studied, or other noteworthy things conceived by ingenious speculation.

The five senses are the ministers of the soul.

He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.

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.

A good memory, which nature has endowed us with, causes things long past to seem present.

The discovery of a good wine is increasingly better for mankind than the discovery of a new star.

A gray day provides the best light.

A well-spent day brings happy sleep.

As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.

Whatever you think matters - doesn't. Follow this rule, and you will add decades to your life. Rodger Rosenblatt As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.

A life well used procures a happy death.

Nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first understood.

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.

The art of procreation and the members employed therein are so repulsive, that if it were not for the beauty of the faces and the adornments of the actors and the pent-up impulse, nature would lose the human species.

The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.

In her (nature's) inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.

Realize that everything connects to everything else.

Thirst will parch your tongue and your body will waste through lack of sleep ere you can describe in words that which painting instantly sets before the eye.

Men wrongly lament the flight of time, blaming it for being too swift; they do not perceive that its passage is sufficiently long, but a good memory, which nature has given to us, causes things long past to seem present.

To make a perfume, take some rose water and wash your hands in it, then take a lavender flower and rub it with your palms, and you will achieve the desired effect

The young man should first learn perspective, then the proportions of objects. Next, copy work after the hand of a good master, to gain the habit of drawing parts of the body well; and then to work from nature, to confirm the lessons learned.

life without love, is no life at all

Shadow is the diminution alike of light and of darkness, and stands between darkness and light.

I have discovered that a screw-shaped device such as this, if it is well made from starched linen, will rise in the air if turned quickly.

One has no right to love or hate anything if one has not acquired a thorough knowledge of its nature. Great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you know it but little you will be able to love it only a little or not at all.

If the thing loved is base, the lover becomes base.

I know very well that because I am unlettered some presumptuous people will think they have the right to criticize me, saying that I am an uncultured man. What stupid fools! Do they not know that I could reply to them as Marius did to the Roman patricians: "Do those who pride themselves on the works of other men claim to challenge mine?