Leonardo da Vinci
Intellectual passion dries out sensuality.Collection: Passion
Just as a well-filled day brings blessed sleep, so a well-employed life brings a blessed death.Collection: Inspirational
Learning acquired in youth arrests the evil of old age; and if you understand that old age has wisdom for its food, you will so conduct yourself in youth that your old age will not lack for nourishment.Collection: Inspirational
For youth, everything is sport.Collection: Sports
Things that are separate shall be united and acquire such virtue that they will restore to man his lost memory.Collection: Memories
A day will come in which men will look upon an animal's murder the same way they look today upon a man's murder.Collection: Animal
When you draw a nude, sketch the whole figure and nicely fit the members to it and to each other. Even though you may only finish one portion of the drawing, just make certain that all the parts hang together, so that the study will be useful to you in the future.Collection: Beauty
Men born in hot countries love the night because it refreshes them and have a horror of light because it burns them.Collection: Country
Men wrongly lament the flight of time, blaming it for being too swift; they do not perceive that its passage is sufficiently long, but a good memory, which nature has given to us, causes things long past to seem present.Collection: Time
In whatever system where the weight attached to the wheel should be the cause of motion of the wheel, without any doubt the center of the gravity of the weight will stop beneath the center of its axle. No instrument devised by human ingenuity, which turns with its wheel, can remedy this effect. Oh, speculators about perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you created in the like quest. Go and take you place with the seekers after gold.Collection: Doubt
The fame of the rich man dies with him; the fame of the treasure, and not of the man who possessed it, remains.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Life
Black is like a broken vessel, which is deprived of the capacity to contain anything.Collection: Broken
O Time with your teethy years! You swallow up all things little by little in a slow-motion, wrinkling process of dying.Collection: Years
Who would believe that so small a space could contain the images of all the universe?Collection: Nature
Experiment is the sole interpreter of the artifices of Nature.Collection: Sole
When the thing taken into union is perfectly adapted to that which receives it, the result is delight and pleasure and satisfaction.Collection: Taken
The art of procreation and the members employed therein are so repulsive, that if it were not for the beauty of the faces and the adornments of the actors and the pent-up impulse, nature would lose the human species.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Color
The eye, the window of the soul, is the chief means whereby the understanding can most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of Nature; and the ear is second.Collection: Appreciation
It is an acknowledged fact that we perceive errors in the work of others more readily than in our own.Collection: Errors
If you are representing a white body let it be surrounded by ample space, because as white has no colour of its own, it is tinged and altered in some degree by the colour of the objects surrounding itCollection: White
All the bystanders at an event worthy of note adopt various gestures of admiration when contemplating the occurrence.Collection: Bystanders
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.Collection: Nature
Medicine is the restoration of discordant elements.Collection: Medicine
Perspective is the rein and rudder of painting.Collection: Perspective
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.Collection: Falling In Love
The limiting surface of one thing is the beginning of another.Collection: Intelligent
The eye - which sees all objects reversed - retains the images for some time.Collection: Eye
If a man has a tent made of linen of which the apertures have all been stopped up, and be it twelve bracchia across (over twenty-five feet) and twelve in depth, he will be able to throw himself down from any height without sustaining injury. [His concept of the parachute.]Collection: Men
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.Collection: Eye
Nature is so delightful and abundant in its variations that among trees of the same kind there would not be found one which nearly resembles another, and not only the plants as a whole, but among their branches, leaves, and fruit, will not be found one which is precisely like another.Collection: Nature
To speak of this subject you must... explain the nature of the resistance of the air, in the second the anatomy of the bird and its wings, in the third the method of working the wings in their various movements, in the fourth the power of the wings and the tail when the wings are not being moved and when the wind is favourable to serve as guide in various movements.Collection: Nature
Be eager to lend a patient ear to the opinions of others and think long and hard whether whoever finds fault has reason or not to censure you. And if the answer is yes, correct the fault. If no, give the impression that you have not heard him, or if he is a man whom you respect, explain to him why he is mistaken.Collection: Men
I say that in narrative paintings one should mingle direct contraries close by, because they produce strong contrasts with one another, and all the more so when they are very close together; that is, the ugly next to the beautiful, the big to the small, the old to the young, the strong to the weak; in this way you will vary as much as possible and close by.Collection: Beautiful
Every part is disposed to unite with the whole, that it may thereby escape from its own incompleteness.Collection: May
The merit of painting lies in the exactness of reproduction. Painting is a science and all sciences are based on mathematics. No human inquiry can be a science unless it pursues its path through mathematical exposition and demonstration.Collection: Lying
No one should ever imitate the style of another because, with regard to art, he will be called a nephew and not a child of nature.Collection: Art
If anyone wishes to see how the soul dwells in its body, let him observe how this body uses its daily habitation; that is to say, if this is devoid of order and confused, the body will be kept in disorder and confusion by its soul.Collection: Confused
A luminous body will appear more brilliant in proportion as it is surrounded by deeper shadow.Collection: Shadow
A natural action is accomplished in the briefest manner.Collection: Action
He who despises painting has no love for the philosophy in nature.Collection: Philosophy
Demetrius was wont to say that there was no difference between the words and speech of the unskilled and ignorant and the sounds and rumblings caused by the stomach being full of superfluous wind. This he said, not without reason, for, as he held, it did not in the least matter from what part of them the voice emanated, whether from the lower parts or the mouth, since the one and the other were of equal worth and importance.Collection: Wind
The light for drawing from nature should come from the North in order that it may not vary. And if you have it from the South, keep the window screened with cloth, so that with the sun shining the whole day the light may not vary. The height of the light so arranged as that every object shall cast a shadow on the ground of the same length as itself.Collection: Order
Do not imitate one another's style. If you do, so far as your art is concerned you will be called a grandson, rather than the son of Nature.Collection: Art
Nature appears to have been the cruel stepmother rather than the mother of many animals.Collection: Mother
A painter was asked why, since he made such beautiful figures, which were but dead things, his children were so ugly; to which the painter replied that he made his pictures by day, and his children by night.Collection: Beautiful
The lover is drawn by the thing loved, as the sense is by that which it perceives.Collection: Lovers
The first of all simple colours is White ... We shall set down White for the representative of light, without which no colour can be seen; Yellow for the earth; Green for water; Blue for air; Red for fire; and Black for total darkness.Collection: Fire