Quotes By Leonardo da Vinci

Men standing in opposite hemispheres will converse and deride each other and embrace each other, and understand each other's language.

Let no man who is not a Mathematician read the elements of my work.

Happy will they be who lend ear to the words of the dead.

The earth is moved from its position by the weight of a tiny bird resting upon it.

If the thing loved is base, the lover becomes base.

The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.

The lover is moved by the thing loved, as the sense is by that which perceives, and it unites with it and they become one and the same thing... when the lover is united with the beloved it finds rest there; when the burden is laid down there it finds rest.

Patience serves us against insults precisely as clothes do against the cold. For if you multiply your garments as the cold increases, that cold cannot hurt you; in the same way increase your patience under great offenses, and they cannot hurt your feelings.

A good painter has two main objects to paint, man and the intention of his soul. The former is easy, the latter hard as he has to represent it by the attitude and movement of the limbs.

Fire destroys falsehood, that is sophistry, and restores truth, driving out darkness.

Slender certainty is better than portentous falsehood.

My works are the issue of simple and plain experience which is the true mistress.

The Medici created and destroyed me.

Nature appears to have been the cruel stepmother rather than the mother of many animals.

Man and the animals are merely a passage and channel for food, a tomb for other animals, a haven for the dead, giving life by the death of others, a coffer full of corruption.

There are three aspects to perspective. The first has to do with how the size of objects seems to diminish according to distance: the second, the manner in which colors change the farther away they are from the eye; the third defines how objects ought to be finished less carefully the farther away they are.

To me it seems that those sciences are vain and full of error which are not born of experience, mother of all certainty, first-hand experience which in its origins, or means, or end has passed through one of the five senses.

Although human ingenuity may devise various inventions which, by the help of various instruments, answer to one and the same purpose, yet will it never discover any inventions more beautiful, more simple or more practical than those of nature, because in her inventions there is nothing lacking and nothing superfluous; and she makes use of no counterpoise when she constructs the limbs of animals in such a way as to correspond to the motion of their bodies, but she puts into them the soul of the body.

Just as courage is the danger of life, so is fear its safeguard.

I have found that, in the composition of the human body as compared with the bodies of animals, the organs of sense are duller and coarser. Thus, it is composed of less ingenious instruments, and of spaces less capacious for receiving the faculties of sense.