Top 450 Leonardo da Vinci Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “O mighty and once living instrument of formative nature. Incapable of availing thyself of thy vast strength thou hast to abandon a life of stillness and to obey the law which God and time gave to procreative nature.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

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

— Leonardo da Vinci

403. “Many will think they may reasonably blame me by alleging that my proofs are opposed to the authority of certain men held in the highest reverence by their inexperienced judgments; not considering that my works are the issue of pure and simple experience.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

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

— Leonardo da Vinci

405. “He who wishes to see how the soul inhabits the body should look to see how that body uses its daily surroundings. If the dwelling is dirty and neglected, the body will be kept by its soul in the same condition, dirty and neglected.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

406. “If the thing loved is base, the lover becomes base.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

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

— Leonardo da Vinci

408. “Whatever you think matters – doesn’t. Follow this rule, and you will add decades to your life. Rodger Rosenblatt As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

409. “Lying on a feather mattress or quilt will not bring you renown.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

410. “Men standing in opposite hemispheres will converse and deride each other and embrace each other, and understand each other’s language.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

411. “Here is a thing which the more you fear and avoid it the nearer you approach to it, and this is misery; the more you flee from it the more miserable and restless you will become.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

412. “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.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

413. “Things severed shall be united and shall acquire of themselves such virtue that they shall restore to men their lost memory: – That is the papyrus sheets, which are formed out of several strips and preserve the memory of the thoughts and deeds of men.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

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

— Leonardo da Vinci

415. “The painter who draws by practise and judgment of the eye without the use of reason is like the mirror which reproduces within itself all the objects which are set opposite to it without knowledge of the same.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

416. “I abhor the supreme folly of those who blame the disciples of nature in defiance of those masters who were themselves her pupils.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

417. “It is no small benefit on finding oneself in bed in the dark to go over again in the imagination the main lines of the forms previously studied, or other noteworthy things conceived by ingenious speculation.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

418. “I am not to blame for putting forward, in the course of my work on science, any general rule derived from a previous conclusion.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

419. “A single and distinct luminous body causes stronger relief in the objects than a diffused light; as may be seen by comparing one side of a landscape illuminated by the sun, and one overshadowed by clouds, and illuminated only by the diffused light of the atmosphere.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

420. “The lover is drawn by the thing loved, as the sense is by that which it perceives...”

— Leonardo da Vinci

421. “An infinite number of men will sell publicly and unhindered things of the very highest price, without leave from the Master of it; while it never was theirs nor in their power; and human justice will not prevent it.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

422. “All the bystanders at an event worthy of note adopt various gestures of admiration when contemplating the occurrence.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

423. “The variety of colour in objects cannot be discerned at a great distance, excepting in those parts which are directly lighted up by the solar rays.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

424. “A man was desired to rise from bed because the sun was already up. He replied: “If I had as far to go and as much to do as he has, I should be up by now; but having but a little way to go, I shall not get up yet.””

— Leonardo da Vinci

425. “We may call painting the grandchild of nature.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

426. “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.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

427. “The instant the atmosphere is illuminated it will be filled with an infinite number of images which are produced by the various bodies and colours assembled in it. And the eye is the target, a lodestone, of these images.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

428. “Oh! Speculators on things, boast not of knowing the things that nature ordinarily brings about; but rejoice if you know the end of those things which you yourself device.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

429. “Some promises and time disappoint us.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

430. “The memory of benefits is a frail defence against ingratitude.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

431. “Experience, the interpreter between creative nature and the human race, teaches the action of nature among mortals: how under the constraint of necessity she cannot act otherwise than as reason, who steers her helm, teaches her to act.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

432. “The painter strives and competes with nature.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

433. “All the elements will be seen mixed together in a great whirling mass, now borne towards the centre of the world, now towards the sky; and now furiously rushing from the South towards the frozen North, and sometimes from the East towards the West, and then again from this hemisphere to the other.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

434. “Those who become enamoured of the art, without having previously applied to the diligent study of the scientific part of it, may be compared to mariners who put to the sea in a ship without rudder or compass and therefore cannot be certain of arriving at the wished for port.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

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

— Leonardo da Vinci

436. “A man of supreme folly: his life flies away while he is merely hoping to enjoy it.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

437. “If you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. Let us hope that.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

438. “It is a far worthier thing to read by the light of experience than to adorn oneself with the labors of others.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

439. “To speak ill of a good person is not truly good, all in all.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

440. “Oh! how foul a thing, that we should see the tongue of one animal in the guts of another.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

441. “Many will be busied in taking away from a thing, which will grow in proportion as it is diminished.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

442. “Nothing is so much to be feared as Evil Report.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

443. “Weight is caused by one element being situated in another; and it moves by the shortest line towards its centre, not by its own choice, not because the centre draws it to itself, but because the other intervening element cannot withstand it.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

444. “The divisions of Perspective are 3, as used in drawing; of these, the first includes the diminution in size of opaque objects; the second treats of the diminution and loss of outline in such opaque objects; the third, of the diminution and loss of colour at long distances.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

445. “The motions of men must be such as suggest their dignity or their baseness.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

446. “Nature is constrained by the cause of her laws which dwell inborn in her. Variant: Nature is constrained by the order of her own law which lives and works within her.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

447. “Men and words are ready made, and you, O Painter, if you do not know how to make your figures move, are like an orator who knows not how to use his words.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

448. “Men born in hot countries love the night because it refreshes them and have a horror of light because it burns them.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

449. “Sculptured figures which appear in motion, will, in their standing position, actually look as if they were falling forward.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

450. “When that which loves is united to the thing beloved it can rest there; when the burden is laid down it finds rest there. There will be eternal fame also for the inhabitants of that town, constructed and enlarged by him.”

— Leonardo da Vinci