Leonardo da Vinci Quotes
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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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Like a whirling wind which rushes down a sandy and hollow valley, and which, in its hasty course, drives to its centre every thing that opposes its furious course... No otherwise does the Northern blast whirl round in its tempestuous progress...
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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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I am still hopeful. A falcon, Time. But the coincidence is probably accidental.
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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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Movement will fail sooner than usefulness.
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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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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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Our life is made by the death of others.
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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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The motions of men must be such as suggest their dignity or their baseness.
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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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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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The senses are of the earth; Reason, stands apart in contemplation.
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We ought not to desire the impossible.
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Every instrument requires to be made by experience.
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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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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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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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You do ill if you praise, and still worse if you reprove in a matter you do not understand.
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The motive power is the cause of all life.
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Fire destroys falsehood, that is sophistry, and restores truth, driving out darkness.
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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.