Leonardo da Vinci Quotes
-
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...
-
The motive power is the cause of all life.
-
He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.
-
Fire destroys falsehood, that is sophistry, and restores truth, driving out darkness.
-
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.
-
Tell me if anything was ever done.
-
If you transmit the rays of the sun through a hole in the shape of a star you will see a beautiful effect of perspective in the spot where the sun's rays fall.
-
Reserve the great matters till the end, and the small matters give at the beginning.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The sun gives spirit and life to plants and the earth nourishes them with moisture.
-
Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.
-
The eye can best distinguish the forms of objects when it is placed between the shaded and the illuminated parts.
-
Truth here makes Falsehood torment lying tongues.
-
He who does not punish evil commands that it be done.
-
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.
-
To speak well of a base man is much the same as speaking ill of a good man.
-
Shun those studies in which the work that results dies with the worker.
-
Ask counsel of him who rules himself well.
-
That man is of supreme folly who always wants for fear of wanting; and his life flies away while he is still hoping to enjoy the good things which he has with extreme labour acquired.
-
A single and distinct luminous body causes stronger relief in the object than a diffused light; as may be seen by comparing one side of a landscape illuminated by the sun, and one overshadowed by clouds, and so illuminated only by the diffused light of the atmosphere.
-
A vase of unbaked clay, when broken, may be remoulded, but not a baked one.
-
The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
-
The image of the sun where it falls appears as a thing which covers the person who attempts to cover it.