Quotes By Leonardo da Vinci

Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature.

Wisdom is the daughter of experience.

He who possesses most must be most afraid of loss.

Wherever good fortune enters, envy lays siege to the place and attacks it; and when it departs, sorrow and repentance remain behind.

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!

As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.

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.

Learning acquired in youth arrests the evil of old age; and if you understand that old age has wisdom for its food, you will so conduct yourself in youth that your old age will not lack for nourishment.

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

For, verily, great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it, you will be able to love it only little or not at all.

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

Whoever despises the high wisdom of mathematics nourishes himself on delusion and will never still the sophistic sciences whose only product is an eternal uproar.

Mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences, because by means of it one comes to the fruits of mathematics.

The merit of painting lies in the exactness of reproduction. Painting is a science and all sciences are based on mathematics. No human enquiry can be a science unless it pursues its path through mathematical exposition and demonstration.

The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.

No human investigation can be called real science if it cannot be demonstrated mathematically.

Thou, O God, dost sell us all good things at the price of labour.

The supreme misfortune is when theory outstrips performance.