Leonardo da Vinci Quotes
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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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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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Movement will fail sooner than usefulness.
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The motions of men must be such as suggest their dignity or their baseness.
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Be not false about the past.
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Fire destroys falsehood, that is sophistry, and restores truth, driving out darkness.
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Every instrument requires to be made by 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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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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I find that any luminous body when seen through a dense and thick mist diminishes in proportion to its distance from the eye. Thus it is with the sun by day, as well as the moon and the other eternal lights by night. And when the air is clear, these luminaries appear larger in proportion as they are farther from the eye.
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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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It is bad if you praise, and worse if you reprove a thing, I mean, if you do not understand the matter well.
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Reprove your friend in secret and praise him openly.
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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 ask how far away the eye can discern a non-luminous body, as, for instance, a mountain. It will be very plainly visible if the sun is behind it; and could be seen at a greater or less distance according to the sun's place in the sky.
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The sun gives spirit and life to plants and the earth nourishes them with moisture.
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A bird makes the same use of wings and tail in the air as a swimmer does of his arms and legs in the water.
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We ought not to desire the impossible.
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I am still hopeful. A falcon, Time. But the coincidence is probably accidental.
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He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.
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Experience, the interpreter between formative nature and the human race, teaches how that nature acts among mortals; and being constrained by necessity cannot act otherwise than as reason, which is its helm, requires her to act.
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A vase of unbaked clay, when broken, may be remoulded, but not a baked one.
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Love, Fear, and Esteem, - Write these on three stones.
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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...