Top 450 Leonardo da Vinci Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Test knowledge through experience, be prepared to make mistakes, and be persistent about it.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

202. “The young man should first learn perspective, then the proportions of objects. Next, copy work after the hand of a good master, to gain the habit of drawing parts of the body well; and then to work from nature, to confirm the lessons learned.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

203. “Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass, though but slowly.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

204. “Poetry is superior to painting in the presentation of words, and painting is superior to poetry in the presentation of facts. For this reason I judge painting to be superior to poetry.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

205. “A good memory, which nature has endowed us with, causes things long past to seem present.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

206. “Truth was always but the daughter of time.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

207. “That painter who has no doubts will achieve little.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

208. “People of higher talent work, even if they seem to do nothing.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

209. “Virtue is our true wealth and the true reward of its possessor; it cannot be lost, it never deserts us until life leaves us.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

210. “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

211. “When you are alone you are all your own.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

212. “The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

213. “O speculators about perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you created in the like quest? Go and take your place with the seekers after gold.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

214. “When you put your hand in a flowing stream, you touch the last that has gone before and the first of what is still to come.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

215. “Of the original phenomena, light is the most enthralling.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

216. “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

217. “A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

218. “People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

219. “He who can copy can do.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

220. “The Medici created and destroyed me.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

221. “The worst evil which can befall the artist is that his work should appear good in his own eyes.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

222. “Any color is more distinctly seen when opposed to its contrary: thus, black on white, blear near yellow, green near red, and so on.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

223. “Truth is so excellent, that if it praises but small things they become noble.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

224. “Everything proceeds from everything else and everything becomes everything, and everything can be turned into everything else.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

225. “Inaction saps the vigor of the mind.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

226. “Good culture is born of a good disposition; and since the cause is more to be praised than the effect, I will rather praise a good disposition without culture, than good culture without the disposition.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

227. “We, by our arts may be called the grandsons of God.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

228. “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

229. “To discover the soul living in somebody’s body, we watch the surrounding of the body, and if it’s messy and disordered, so is the soul.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

230. “For youth, everything is sport.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

231. “The human being, creature of eyes, needs the image.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

232. “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.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

233. “The knowledge of the past times and of the places of the earth is both an ornament and nutriment to the human mind.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

234. “The great man presides over all his states of consciousness with obstinate rigor.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

235. “Just as iron which is not used grows rusty, and water putrefies and freezes in the cold, so the mind of which no use is made is spoilt.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

236. “The boundaries of bodies are the least of all things.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

237. “Man’s external form, marvellously constructed, is not much as compared with the divine soul that dwells inside that structure.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

238. “That which has no limitations, has no form.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

239. “There is nothing which deceives us as much as our own judgement.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

240. “Poor is the man who desires a lot.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

241. “The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

242. “Avoid studies of which the result dies with the worker.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

243. “The good painter must paint two things: a person and the essence of his soul.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

244. “The eye which turns from a white object in the light of the sun and goes into a less fully lighted place will see everything as dark.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

245. “The spirit desires to remain with its body, because, without the organic instruments of that body, it can neither act, nor feel anything.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

246. “To any white body receiving the light from the sun, or the air, the shadows will be of a bluish cast.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

247. “One can have no more mastery over the environment, than one has over himself.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

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

— Leonardo da Vinci

249. “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

250. “I shall do down in history as the man who opened a door!”

— Leonardo da Vinci