Leonardo da Vinci Quotes

"I have wasted my hours."

"Be not false about the past."

"A point is not part of a line."

"Who sows virtue reaps honor."

"He who thinks little, errs much."

"He who walks straight rarely falls."

"Art is never finished, only abandoned."

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."

"Water is the driving force of all nature."

"Ask counsel of him who rules himself well."

"It's easier to resist at the beginning than at the end."

"Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it."

"All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions."

"Learning acquired in youth arrests the evil of old age;"

"We, by our arts may be called the grandsons of God."

"He who possesses most must be most afraid of loss."

"He who does not punish evil commands it to be done."

"It is easier to contend with evil at the first than at the last."

"He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year."

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

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

"Shun those studies in which the work that results dies with the worker."

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

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

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

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

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

"The sun gives spirit and life to plants and the earth nourishes them with moisture."

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

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

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

"There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see."

"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."

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

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

"A picture or representation of human figures, ought to be done in such a way as that the spectator may easily recognise, by means of their attitudes, the purpose in their minds."

"The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies every thing placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence."

"All objects transmit their image to the eye in pyramids, and the nearer to the eye these pyramids are intersected the smaller will the image appear of the objects which cause them."

"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."

"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."

"Perspective is nothing more than a rational demonstration applied to the consideration of how objects in front of the eye transmit their image to it, by means of a pyramid of lines. The Pyramid is the name I apply to the lines which, starting from the surface and edges of each object, converge from a distance and meet in a single point."

"The earth is not in the centre of the Sun's orbit nor at the centre of the universe, but in the centre of its companion elements, and united with them. And any one standing on the moon, when it and the sun are both beneath us, would see this our earth and the element of water upon it just as we see the moon, and the earth would light it as it lights us."

"A shadow may be infinitely dark, and also of infinite degrees of absence of darkness. 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."

"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."