Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most quoted people on the internet. Just spend an hour or two on social media and you’ll undoubtedly come across one of his sayings on art or science. I recall studying his works during early highschool, and I hope these quotes can help you find that inner inspiration.
Best Quotes by Leonardo da Vinci Quotes
1. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.
2. Who sows virtue reaps honor.
3. One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.
4. Experience is a truer guide than the words of others.
5. There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.
6. A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
10. The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.
11. While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
12. I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.
13. The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
14. Learning never exhausts the mind.
15. The acquisition of 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.
16. All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.
17. The knowledge of all things is possible.
18. The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
19. Tears come from the heart and not from the brain.
20. 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.
21. Once you 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.
22. It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.
23. I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die.
24. Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?
25. The deeper the feeling, the greater the pain.
26. Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art.
27. The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.
28. The artist sees what others only catch a glimpse of.
29. Life without love, is no life at all.
30. Water is the driving force of all nature.
31. I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.
32. Wisdom is the daughter of experience.
33. I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.
34. 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.
35. Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.
36. Intellectual passion drives out sensuality.
37. Small rooms or dwellings discipline the mind; large ones weaken it.
38. All sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of Experience, the mother of all Knowledge.
39. The painter has the universe in his mind and hands.
40. As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.
41. The mind that engages in subjects of too great variety becomes confused and weakened.
42. I awoke, only to find that the rest of the world is still asleep.
43. Many have made a trade of delusions and false miracles, deceiving the stupid multitudes.
44. Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.
