Leonardo da Vinci Quotations

Leonardo da Vinci Quotations

The eye is the window of the soul. Every difficulty can be overcome by effort. The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

—Leonardo da Vinci

Perspective is the bridle and rudder of painting.

—Notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

—Notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci

The span of a man's outspread arms is equal to his height.

—Notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.

—Leonardo da Vinci

Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind.

—Notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci

Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.

—Notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.

—Notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci

Marriage: putting one's hand into a bag of snakes on the chance of drawing out an eel.

—Notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci

When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.

—Notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci

Those who become enamored of practices without science are like sailors who go aboard ship without a rudder and compass, for they are never certain where they will land.

—Notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci

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

—Notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci

The most praiseworthy form of painting is the one that most resembles what it imitates.

—Leonardo da Vinci

You can have no greater or lesser dominion than the one over yourself. The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

—Leonardo da Vinci

Man has great power of speech, but the greater part thereof is empty and deceitful. The animals have little, but that little is useful and true; and better is a small and certain thing than a great falsehood .

—Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks, c. 1500.

Falsehood is so utterly vile that though it should praise the great works of God it offends against His divinity; truth is of such excellence that if it praise the meanest things they become ennobled.

—Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks, c. 1500.

Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity, and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind.

—Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks, c. 1500.

Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature. Necessity is the theme and artificer of nature, the bridle and eternal law.

—Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks, c. 1500.