Leonardo da Vinci Quotes
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Every action needs to be prompted by a motive. To know and to will are two operations of the human mind. Discerning, judging, deliberating are acts of the human mind.
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Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.
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Happy will they be who lend ear to the words of the Dead.
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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.
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Every body that is moved continues to move so long as the impression of the force of its mover is retained in it, therefore the movement of this wing with violence... will come to move the whole bird with it until the impetus of the moved air has been consumed.
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Necessity is the mistress and guardian of Nature.
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Every part is disposed to unite with the whole, that it may thereby escape from its own incompleteness.
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Nature is full of infinite causes which were never set forth in experience.
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The water which rises in the mountain is the blood which keeps the mountain in life.
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Men out of fear will cling to the thing they most fear.
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The solar rays will kindle fire on the earth, by which a thing that is under the sky will be set on fire, and, being reflected by some obstacle, it will bend downwards.
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When I did well, as a boy you used to put me in prison. Now if I do it being grown up, you will do worse to me.
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Things that are separate shall be united and acquire such virtue that they will restore to man his lost memory.
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The city will gain beauty worthy of its name and to you it will be useful by its revenues, and the eternal fame of its aggrandizement.
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Some there are who are nothing else than a passage for food and augmentors of excrement and fillers of privies, because through them no other things in the world, nor any good effects are produced, since nothing but full privies results from them.
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As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.
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Oh! how foul a thing, that we should see the tongue of one animal in the guts of another.
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There will be great winds by reason of which things of the East will become things of the West; and those of the South, being involved in the course of the winds, will follow them to distant lands.
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Things severed shall be united and shall acquire of themselves such virtue that they shall restore to men their lost memory:-That is the papyrus sheets, which are formed out of several strips and preserve the memory of the thoughts and deeds of men.
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This writing distinctly about the kite seems to be my destiny, because among the first recollections of my infancy, it seemed to me that, as I was in my cradle, a kite came to me and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me several times with its tail inside my lips.
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Remember that your bird should have no other model than the bat, because its membranes serve as an armour or rather as a means of building together the pieces of its armour, that is the framework of the wings.
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Every quantity is intellectually conceivable as infinitely divisible.
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It vexes me greatly that having to earn my living has forced me to interrupt the work and to attend to small matters.
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What is called Nothingness is to be found only in time and in speech. In time it stands between the past and future and has no existence in the present; and thus in speech it is one of the things of which we say: They are not, or they are impossible.