Leonardo da Vinci Quotes
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Wisdom is the daughter of experience.
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O mighty and once living instrument of formative nature. Incapable of availing thyself of thy vast strength thou hast to abandon a life of stillness and to obey the law which God and time gave to procreative nature.
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All the elements will be seen mixed together in a great whirling mass, now borne towards the centre of the world, now towards the sky; and now furiously rushing from the South towards the frozen North, and sometimes from the East towards the West, and then again from this hemisphere to the other.
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O sleepers! what a thing is slumber! Sleep resembles death. Ah, why then dost thou not work in such wise as that after death thou mayst retain a resemblance to perfect life, when, during life, thou art in sleep so like to the hapless dead?
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Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.
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I am still hopeful. A falcon, Time. But the coincidence is probably accidental.
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Movement will fail sooner than usefulness.
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Our life is made by the death of others.
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It is always the under side of the branches of any plant that show themselves to the wind which strikes it, and one leans against the other.
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Love, Fear, and Esteem, - Write these on three stones.
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No impetus created by any movement whatever can be immediately consumed, but if it finds an object which has a great resistance it consumes itself in a reflex movement.
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Fire is to represent truth because it destroys all sophistry and lies; and the mask is for lying and falsehood which conceal truth.
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Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass, though but slowly.
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The senses are of the earth; Reason, stands apart in contemplation.
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That part of the air which is nearest to the wing which presses on it, will have the greatest density.
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We ought not to desire the impossible.
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The motions of men must be such as suggest their dignity or their baseness.
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You will perhaps say that the sinews and muscles of a bird are incomparably more powerful than those of a man... But the reply to this is that such great strength gives it a reserve of power beyond what it ordinarily uses...
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To lie is so vile, that even if it were in speaking well of godly things it would take off something from God's grace; and Truth is so excellent, that if it praises but small things they become noble.
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The motive power is the cause of all life.
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The cock does not crow till it has thrice flapped its wings; the parrot in moving among boughs never puts its feet excepting where it has first put its beak. Vows are not made till Hope is dead.
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The man who blames the supreme certainty of mathematics feeds on confusion, and can never silence the contradictions of sophistical sciences which lead to an eternal quackery.
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Every instrument requires to be made by experience.
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You do ill if you praise, and still worse if you reprove in a matter you do not understand.