Leonardo da Vinci Quotes

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Leonardo da Vinci

Profession : Artist

Birth : April 15, 1452

I have wasted my hours.

Leonardo da Vinci

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

Leonardo da Vinci

I have always felt it is my destiny to build a machine that would allow man to fly.

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

How many emperors and how many princes have lived and died and no record of them remains, and they only sought to gain dominions and riches in order that their fame might be ever-lasting.

Leonardo da Vinci

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

Leonardo da Vinci

Science is the captain, and practice the soldiers.

Leonardo da Vinci

Many are they who have a taste and love for drawing, but no talent; and this will be discernible in boys who are not diligent and never finish their drawings with shading.

Leonardo da Vinci

It seems that it had been destined before that I should occupy myself so thoroughly with the vulture, for it comes to my mind as a very early memory, when I was still in the cradle, a vulture came down to me, he opened my mouth with his tail and struck me a few times with his tail against my lips.

Leonardo da Vinci

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

There are four Powers: memory and intellect, desire and covetousness. The two first are mental and the others sensual. The three senses: sight, hearing and smell cannot well be prevented; touch and taste not at all.

Leonardo da Vinci

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

Leonardo da Vinci

The senses are of the earth, the reason stands apart from them in contemplation.

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

The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies every thing placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence.

Leonardo da Vinci

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

Leonardo da Vinci

People talk to people who perceive nothing, who have open eyes and see nothing; they shall talk to them and receive no answer; they shall adore those who have ears and hear nothing; they shall burn lamps for those who do not see.

Leonardo da Vinci

I have found that, in the composition of the human body as compared with the bodies of animals, the organs of sense are duller and coarser. Thus, it is composed of less ingenious instruments, and of spaces less capacious for receiving the faculties of sense.

Leonardo da Vinci

Weight, force and casual impulse, together with resistance, are the four external powers in which all the visible actions of mortals have their being and their end.

Leonardo da Vinci

As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.

Leonardo da Vinci