30 Famous Leonardo da Vinci Quotes
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) is one of the most intriguing personalities in the history of Western art. Trained in Florence as a painter and sculptor in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio (1435–1488), Leonardo is also celebrated for his scientific contributions. His curiosity and insatiable hunger for knowledge never left him. He was constantly observing, experimenting, and inventing, and drawing was, for him, a tool for recording his investigation of nature. Although completed works by Leonardo are few, he left a large body of drawings (almost 2,500) that record his ideas, most still gathered into notebooks.
- “All our knowledge hast its origins in our perceptions … In nature there is no effect without a cause … Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments … Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass.”
- “poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.”
- “…the love of anything is the offspring of knowledge, love being more fervent in proportion as knowledge is more certain. And this certainty springs from a complete knowledge of all parts which united compose the whole of the thing which out to be loved.”
- “If the painter wishes to see beauties that charm him, it lies in his power to create them, and if he wishes to see monstrosities that are frightful, ridiculous, or truly pitiable, he is lord and God thereof.”
- “And you who wish to represent by words the form of man and all the aspects of his membrification, relinquish that idea. For the more minutely you describe the more you will confine the mind of the reader, and the more you will keep him from the knowledge of the thing described. And so it is necessary to draw and to describe.”
- “Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing”
- “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.”
- “For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.”
- “Those who fall in love with practice without science are like a sailor who enters a ship without a helm or a compass, and who never can be certain whither he is going.”
- “Fix your course to a star and you can navigate through any storm”
- “It is as great an error to speak well of a worthless man as to speak ill of a good man.”
- “If the painter has clumsy hands, he will be apt to introduce them into his works, and so of any other part of his person, which may not happen to be so beautiful as it ought to be. He must, therefore, guard particularly against that self-love, or too good opinion of his own person, and study by every means to acquire the knowledge of what is most beautiful, and of his own defects, that he may adopt the one and avoid the other.”
- “They will say that I, having no literary skill, cannot properly express that which I desire to treat of, but they do not know that my subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words. And [experience] has been the mistress of those who wrote well. And so, as mistress, I will cite her in all cases. Though I may not, like them, be able to quote other authors, I shall rely on that which is much greater and more worthy: on experience, the mistress of their masters.”
- “Art is never completed, only abandoned.”
- “Noi tutti siamo esiliati
entro lo cornici di uno strano quadro.
Chi sa questo, viva da grande,
Gli altri sono insetti.” - “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.”
- “Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness and Light, Solidity and Color, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest.”
- “Just as food eaten without appetite is a tedious nourishment, so does study without zeal damage the memory by not assimilating what it absorbs.”
- “Not to punish evil is equivalent to authorizing it.”
- “Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.”
- “Lies don’t solve problems it just make it worst …so liars beware”
- “Hari yang dilewatkan dengan baik, akan menghasilkan tidur yang nyenyak.”
- “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.”
- “Nitre, vitriol, cinnabar, alum, salt ammoniac, sublimated mercury, rock salt, alcali salt, common salt, rock alum, alum schist, arsenic, sublimate, realgar, tartar, orpiment, verdegris.”
- “La decadencia llega cuando el hombre deja de fijarse en la naturaleza”
- “i thought i was learning to live but i was learning to die”
- “I awoke, only to see that the rest of the world is still asleep.”
- “Painting is mute poetry, and poetry is blind painting”
- “a life without love, is no life at all”
- “sooner will there exist a body without a shadow than virtue unaccompanied by envy.”
