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.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen;
even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.
– Leonardo da Vinci

As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first understood.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star
does not change his mind.
– Leonardo da Vinci

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.
– Leonardo da Vinci

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her
power.
– Leonardo da Vinci

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

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
Being willing is not enough; we must do.
– Leonardo da Vinci

He who does not oppose evil commands it to be done.
– Leonardo da Vinci

If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one
companion you belong only half to yourself or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness
of his conduct and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the
same plight.
– Leonardo da Vinci

I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave
by reflection.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Just as eating against one’s will is injurious to health, so studying without a liking for it spoils
the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Time stays long enough for those who use it.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Wisdom is the daughter of experience.
– Leonardo da Vinci

The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look
on the murder of men.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works.
If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing
something else.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.
– Leonardo da Vinci

It is true that impatience, the mother of stupidity, praises brevity, as if such persons had not
life long enough to serve them to acquire a complete knowledge of one single subject, such
as the human body.
– Leonardo da Vinci

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.
– Leonardo da Vinci

The artist sees what others only catch a glimpse of.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Oysters open completely when the moon is full; and when the crab sees one it throws a piece
of stone or seaweed into it and the oyster cannot close again so that it serves the crab for
meat. Such is the fate of him who opens his mouth too much and thereby puts himself at the
mercy of the listener.
– Leonardo da Vinci

A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are
dark except where exposed by the light.
– Leonardo da Vinci

He who truly knows has no occasion to shout.
– Leonardo da Vinci

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.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work
your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller
and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more
readily seen.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than
seen.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Learning never exhausts the mind.
– Leonardo da Vinci

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

Who sows virtue reaps honor.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Truth at last cannot be hidden. Dissimulation is of no avail. Dissimulation is to no purpose
before so great a judge. Falsehood puts on a mask. Nothing is hidden under the sun.
– Leonardo da Vinci

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
– Leonardo da Vinci

A poet knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when
there is nothing left to take away.
– Leonardo da Vinci

People react to fear, not love – they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.
– Leonardo da Vinci

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and
let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
– Leonardo da Vinci

One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.
– Leonardo da Vinci

He who thinks little, errs much.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Our life is made by the death of others.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Water is the driving force in nature.
– Leonardo da Vinci

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and
compass and never knows where he may cast.
– Leonardo da Vinci

It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.
– Leonardo da Vinci

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.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Let no man who is not a mathematician read the elements of my work.
– Leonardo da Vinci

God sells us all things at the price of labor.
– Leonardo da Vinci

There are three classes of people: Those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those
who do not see.
– Leonardo da Vinci

No human research can be called true science unless it can be mathematically proved.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Life without love is no life at all.
– Leonardo da Vinci

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

Art is never finished, only abandoned.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are the most active.
– Leonardo da Vinci

To lie is so vile, that even if it were in speaking well of godly things it would take off
something from God’s grace; and Truth is so excellent, that if it praises but small things they
become noble.
– Leonardo da Vinci

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
– Leonardo da Vinci

The knowledge of past times and of the places on the earth is both an ornament and
nutriment to the human mind.
– Leonardo da Vinci

The acquisition of any knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it may thus drive
out useless things and retain the good. For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.
– Leonardo da Vinci

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which
comes: so with present time.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Men out of fear will cling to the thing they most fear.
– Leonardo da Vinci

In order to prove whether the spirit can speak or not, it is necessary in the first place to
define what a voice is and how it is generated.
– Leonardo da Vinci

All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions.
– Leonardo da Vinci

There shall be wings! If the accomplishment be not for me, ’tis for some other.
– Leonardo da Vinci

He who wishes to be rich within a day, will be hanged within a year.
– Leonardo da Vinci

The sun gives spirit and life to plants and the earth nourishes them with moisture.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Make your work to be in keeping with your purpose.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Necessity is the mistress and guardian of nature.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Darkness is absence of light. Shadow is diminution of light.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Man has much power of discourse which for the most part is vain and false; animals have but
little, but it is useful and true, and a small truth is better than a great lie.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Reprove your friend in secret and praise him openly.
– Leonardo da Vinci

He who walks straight rarely falls.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Just as iron rusts from disuse, even so does inaction spoil the intellect.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Learning never exhausts the mind.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.
– Leonardo da Vinci

For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for
there you have been and there you will long to return.
– Leonardo da Vinci