Leonardo Da Vinci Quotes

Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature. Necessity is the theme and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law.

The eye transmits its own image through the air to all the objects which face it, and also receives them on its own surface, whence the "sensus communis" takes them and considers them.

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

Given the cause nature produces the effect in the briefest manner that it can employ.

All objects transmit their image to the eye in pyramids and the nearer to the eye these pyramids are intersected the smaller will the image appear of the objects which cause them.

I have wasted my hours.

Nature varies the seed according to the variety of the things she desires to produce in the world.

Inequality is the cause of all local movements.

Every action done by nature is done in the shortest way.

Just as iron rusts from disuse, and stagnant water putrefies, or when cold turns to ice, so our intellect wastes unless it is kept in use.

Savage is he who saves himself.

Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.

He turns not back who is bound to a star.

A clever man without wisdom is like a beautiful flower without fragrance.

The moment is timeless.

The most beautiful words of love are told in silence for a look.

Not to anticipate is already to moan.

When you are alone you are all your own.

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

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

Many have made a trade of delusions and false miracles, deceiving the stupid multitudes.

The study of what is excellent is food for the mind and body.

There shall be wings! If the accomplishment be not for me, 'tis for some other. The spirit cannot die; and man, who shall know all and shall have wings.

Such is the supreme folly of man that he labours so as to labour no more.

He only moves toward the perfection of his art whose criticism surpasses his achievement.

Ask counsel of him who rules himself well.

Lust is the cause of generation.

My body is not a tomb for animals.

The color of the object illuminated partakes of the color of that which illuminates it.

Medicine is the restoration of discordant elements; sickness is the discord of the elements infused into the living body.

The desire to know is natural to good men.

Just as a well-filled day brings blessed sleep, so a well-employed life brings a blessed death.

Here is a thing which the more it is needed the more it is rejected: and this is advice, which is unwillingly heeded by those who most need it, that is to say, by the ignorant.

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.

A day will come in which men will look upon an animal's murder the same way they look today upon a man's murder.

Painting is concerned with the ten things you can see: these are darkness and brightness, substance and color, form and place, remoteness and nearness, movement and rest.

O Time with your teethy years! You swallow up all things little by little in a slow-motion, wrinkling process of dying.

The mind of a painter should be like a mirror which is filled with as many images as there are things placed before him.

I have discovered that a screw-shaped device such as this, if it is well made from starched linen, will rise in the air if turned quickly.

Make your faces so that they do not all have the same expression, as one sees with most painters, but give them different expression, according to age, complexion, and good or bad character.

Learning acquired in youth arrests the evil of old age.

Of the original phenomena, light is the most enthralling.

Truth was the only daughter of Time.

Do not reveal, if liberty is precious to you; my face is the prison of love.

Test knowledge through experience, be prepared to make mistakes, and be persistent about it.

The first object of the painter is to make a flat plane appear as a body in relief and projecting from that plane

Fire destroys all sophistry, that is deceit; and maintains truth alone, that is gold.

The Medici made me and the Medici destroyed me.

Medicine is the restoration of discordant elements.

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