Leonardo da Vinci Quotes
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You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.
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Constancy does not begin, but is that which perseveres.
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Fire may be represented as the destroyer of all sophistry, and as the image and demonstration of truth; because it is light and drives out darkness which conceals all essences or subtle things.
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There will be many who will eagerly and with great care and solicitude follow up a thing, which, if they only knew its malignity, would always terrify them. Of those men, who, the older they grow, the more avaricious they become, whereas, having but little time to stay, they should become more liberal.
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There will be many men who will move one against another, holding in their hands a cutting tool. But these will not do each other any injury beyond tiring each other; for, when one pushes forward the other will draw back. But woe to him who comes between them! For he will end by being cut in pieces.
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Where there is most power of feeling, there of martyrs is the greatest martyr.
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O Time! consumer of all things; O envious age! thou dost destroy all things and devour all things with the relentless teeth of years, little by little in a slow death. Helen, when she looked in her mirror, seeing the withered wrinkles made in her face by old age, wept and wondered why she had twice been carried away.
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He who possesses most must be most afraid of loss.
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All objects project their whole image and likeness, diffused and mingled in the whole of the atmosphere, opposite to themselves. The image of every point of the bodily surface, exists in every part of the atmosphere. All the images of the objects are in every part of the atmosphere.
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While I thought I have been learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
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Such as harm is when it hurts me not, is good which avails me not.
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A luminous body will appear more brilliant in proportion as it is surrounded by deeper shadow.
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When the sun appears which dispels darkness in general, you put out the light which dispelled it for you in particular for your need and convenience.
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The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies every thing placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence.
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I am not to blame for putting forward, in the course of my work on science, any general rule derived from a previous conclusion.
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Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen. These two arts, you may call them both either poetry or painting, have here interchanged the senses by which they penetrate to the intellect.
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He who does not value life does not deserve it.
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That which has no limitations, has no form. The limitations of two conterminous bodies are interchangeably the surface of each. All the surfaces of a body are not parts of that body.
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One's thoughts turn towards Hope.
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The memory of benefits is a frail defence against ingratitude.
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Human subtlety...will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.
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No small hole can so modify the convergence of rays of light as to prevent, at a long distance, the transmission of the true form of the luminous body causing them.
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Feathers shall raise men towards the heaven even as they do the birds:-That is by the letters written by their quills.
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To preserve Nature's chiefest boon, that is freedom, I can find means of offence and defence, when it is assailed by ambitious tyrants, and first I will speak of the situation of the walls, and also I shall show how communities can maintain their good and just Lords.