Inventors

"Fear arises sooner than anything else."

"We are deceived by promises and time disappoints us..."

"Envy wounds with false accusations, that is with detraction, a thing which scares virtue."

"Patience serves us against insults precisely as clothes do against the cold. For if you multiply your garments as the cold increases, that cold cannot hurt you; in the same way increase your patience under great offences, and they cannot hurt your feelings."

"To speak well of a base man is much the same as speaking ill of a good man."

"Leonardo da Vinci commented, "By the ancients man has been called the world in miniature; and certainly this name is well bestowed because, inasmuch as man is composed of earth, water, air, and fire his body resembles that of the earth.""

"The more the manuscripts of Leonardo are studied, the more one begins to see him not so much as a transcendent artist, but primarily as a man of science, whose skills and commissions as an artist and engineer enabled him to support his fascination with nature."

"I sometimes dwell on the fact that there's one thing that time and humankind will not be able to take away from me, leaving me rich, richer than Croesus: the bliss that I derive from a Heine poem, from a Beethoven sonata or a DaVinci painting."

"What thinker has ever possessed the cosmic vision so insistently? He sought to establish the essential unity of structure of all living things, the earth an organism with veins and arteries, the body of a man a type of that of the world."

"Reading Leonardo one finds many statements suggesting that he was a learned mathematician and a profound philosopher who worked on the level of a professional mathematician. ...To pass beyond observation and experience there was for him only one trustworthy road through deceptions and mirages—mathematics. ...On the basis of such pronouncements, no doubt, Leonardo is often credited with being a greater mathematician than he actually was. When one examines Leonardo's notebooks one realizes how little he knew of mathematics and that his approach was empirical and intuitive."

"Leonardo did believe in the combination of theory and practice."

"Incredibly endowed both physically and mentally, he achieved greatness as a linguist, botanist, zoologist, anatomist, geologist, musician, sculptor, painter, architect, inventor, and engineer. Leonardo made quite a point of distrusting the knowledge that scholars professed so dogmatically. These men of book learning he described as strutting about puffed up and pompous, adorned not by their own labors but by the labors of others whose work they merely repeated... they did not deal with the real world."

"Much as Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance artists used the revelations of human anatomy to help them depict the body more accurately and compellingly, so, too, many contemporary artists may create new forms of representation in response to revelations about how the brain works."

"He was like a man who awoke too early in the darkness, while the others were all still asleep."

"His art took, thus, its guidance in realism, its purpose in spirituality. The search for truth and the desire for beauty were the twin ideals he strove to attain. The keenness of this pursuit saved him from the blemish of egoism which aloofness from his surroundings would otherwise have forced upon him. For his character presented the anomaly, peculiar to the Renaissance, of a lofty idealism coupled in action with irresponsibility of duty. He stood on a higher plane, his attitude toward life recognizing no claims on the part of his fellowmen. In his desire to surpass himself, fostered by this isolation of spirit and spurred on by the eager wish to attain universal knowledge, he has been compared to Faust; but the likeness is only half correct. He was not blind to the limitations which encompassed him, his very genius making him realize their bounds. Of the ancients he said that in attempting to define the nature of the soul, they sought the impossible. He wrote elsewhere, "It is the infinite alone that cannot be attained, for if it could it would become finite.""

"Leonardo had found a refuge in art from the pettiness of material environment. Like his own creations, he, too, had learned the secret of the inner life. The painter, he wrote, could create a world of his own, and take refuge in this new realm. But it must not be one of shadows only. The very mystery he felt so keenly had yet to rest on a real foundation; to treat it otherwise would be to plunge into mere vapouring. Although attempting to bridge the gulf which separated the real from the unreal, he refused to treat the latter supernaturally. That mystery which lesser minds found in the occult, he saw in nature all about him."

"He conceived it to be the painter's duty not only to comment on natural phenomena as restrained by law, but to merge his very mind into that of nature by interpreting its relation with art... The whole world was full of a mystery to him, which his work reflected. The smile of consciousness, pregnant of that which is beyond, illumines the expression of Dino Lisa."

"The genius of Leonardo as a painter came through unfolding the mystery of life..."Look at the grace and sweetness of men and women in the street," he wrote. The most ordinary functions of life and nature amazed him most. He observed of the eye how in it form and colour, and the entire universe it reflected, were reduced to a single point. "Wonderful law of nature, which forced all effects to participate with their cause in the mind of man. These are the true miracles!" Elsewhere he wrote again: "Nature is full of infinite reasons which have not yet passed into experience.""

"Leonardo is the hamlet of art history whom each of us must recreate for ourselves."

"For Leonardo, painting is both an art and a science..."

"Studying Leonardo... will not only allow us to recognize his science as a solid body of knowledge. It will also show why it cannot be understood without his art, nor his art without the science."

"I awoke, only to find that the rest of the world is still asleep."

"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. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else."

"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."

"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."

"Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do."

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."

"The wind which passes through the skins of animals will make men leap up:—That is the bagpipes, which cause men to dance."

"Men will deal rude blows to that which is the cause of their life:—They will thrash the grain."

"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."

"Feathers shall raise men towards the heaven even as they do the birds:—That is by the letters written by their quills."

"Happy will be those who give ear to the words of the dead:—The reading of good works and the observing of their precepts."

"Surely when a man is painting a picture he ought not refuse to hear any man's opinion... Since men are able to form a true judgement as to the works of nature, how much more does it behoove us to admit that they are able to judge our faults. Therefore you should be desirous of hearing patiently the opinions of others, and consider and reflect carefully whether or no he who censures you has reason for his censure; and correct your work if you find that he is right, but if not, then let it seem that you have not understood him, or, in case he is a man whom you esteem, show him by argument why it is that he is mistaken."

"Painting embraces and contains within itself all the things which nature produces or which results from the fortuitous actions of men... he is but a poor master who makes only a single figure well."

"You know that in an atmosphere of uniform density the most distant things seen through it, such as the mountains, in consequence of the great quantity of atmosphere which is between your eye and them, will appear blue. Therfore you should make the building... wall which is more distant less defined and bluer. ...five times as far away make five times as blue."

"When you wish to see whether the general effect of your picture corresponds with that of the object represented after nature, take a mirror and set it so that it reflects the actual thing, and then compare the reflection with your picture, and consider carefully whether the subject of the two images is in conformity with both, studying especially the mirror. The mirror ought to be taken as a guide... you see the picture made upon one plane showing things which appear in relief, and the mirror upon one plane does the same. The picture is on one single surface, and the mirror is the same. ...if you but know well how to compose your picture it will also seem a natural thing seen in a great mirror."

"If you wish to thoroughly accustom yourself to correct and good positions for your fingers, fasten a frame or a loom divided into squares by threads between your eye and the nude figure which you are representing, and then make the same squares upon the paper where you wish to draw the said nude but very faintly. You should then put a pellet of wax on a part of the network to serve as a mark which as you look at your model should always cover the pit of the throat, or if he should have turned his back make it cover one of the vertebrae of the neck. ...The squares you draw may be as much smaller than those of the network in proportion as you wish your figure to be less than life size..."

"Take a piece of glass of the size of a half sheet of royal folio paper, and fix it... between your eye and the object you wish to portray. Then move it away until your eye is two-thirds of a braccio away from the piece of glass, and fasten your head by means of an instrument in such a way as to prevent any movement of it whatsoever. Then close or cover up one eye, and with a brush or a piece of red chalk finely ground mark out on the glass what is visible beyond it; afterwards, copy it by tracing on paper from the glass, then prick it out upon paper of a better quality and paint it if you so desire, paying special attention to the aerial perspective."

"When you have drawn the same thing so many times that it seems that you know it by heart try to do it without the model; but having a tracing made of the model upon a thin piece of smooth glass and lay this upon the drawing you have made without the model. ...where you find that you have erred bear it in mind in order not to make the mistake again. ...if you cannot procure smooth glass to make a tracing... take a piece of very fine parchment well oiled and then dried, and when you have used it for for one drawing you can wipe this out with a sponge and do a second."

"I give the degrees of things seen by the eye as the musician does of the sounds heard by the ear."

"Whenever you make a figure of a man or of some graceful animal remember to avoid making it seem wooden; that is it should move with counterpoise and balance in such a way as not to seem a block of wood."

"Painting is concerned with all the ten attributes of sight, namely darkness and brightness, substance and colour, form and place, remoteness and nearness, movement and rest; and it is with these attributes that this my small book will be woven, recalling to the painter by what rules and in what way he ought by his art to imitate all things that are the work of nature and the adornment of the world."

"Impetus is a power of the mover applied in a movable thing which causes the movable thing to move after it is separated from its mover."

"No impetus created by any movement whatever can be immediately consumed, but if it finds an object which has a great resistance it consumes itself in a reflex movement."

"The properties of the air are such that it may become condensed or rarefied."

"That part of the air which is nearest to the wing which presses on it, will have the greatest density."

"It is always the under side of the branches of any plant that show themselves to the wind which strikes it, and one leans against the other."

"The function which the wing performs against the air when the air is motionless is the same as that of the air moved against the wings when these are without motion."

"The air which is struck with most swiftness by the movable thing is compressed to the greatest degree in itself."

"Swimming upon water teaches men how birds do upon the air."