Leonardo da Vinci
The painter must be solitary. For if you are alone you are completely yourself, but if you are accompanied by a single companion, you are only half yourself.Collection: Half
The soul can never be corrupted with the corruption of the body, but it is like the wind which causes the sound of the organ, and which ceases to produce a good effect when a pipe is spoilt.Collection: Wind
This work should commence with the conception of man, and should describe the nature of the womb, and how the child inhabits it, and in what stage it dwells there, and the manner of its quickening and feeding, and its growth, and what interval there is between one stage of growth and another, and what thing drives it forth from the body of the mother, and for what reason it sometimes emerges from the belly of its mother before the due time.Collection: Mother
The eye transmits its own image through the air to all the objects which face it, and also receives them on its own surface, whence the "sensus communis" takes them and considers them.Collection: Nature
The vine that has grown old on an old tree falls with the ruin of that tree, and through that bad companionship must perish with it.Collection: Fall
Constancy does not begin, but is that which perseveres.Collection: Intelligent
The mind of a painter should be like a mirror which is filled with as many images as there are things placed before him.Collection: Mirrors
Truth was the only daughter of Time.Collection: Daughter
The motions of men must be such as suggest their dignity or their baseness.Collection: Men
Fire is to represent truth because it destroys all sophistry and lies; and the mask is for lying and falsehood which conceal truth.Collection: Lying
O Time! consumer of all things; O envious age! thou dost destroy all things and devour all things with the relentless teeth of years, little by little in a slow death. Helen, when she looked in her mirror, seeing the withered wrinkles made in her face by old age, wept and wondered why she had twice been carried away.Collection: Time
Make an effort to collect the good features from many beautiful faces.Collection: Beautiful
I am still hopeful. A falcon, Time. But the coincidence is probably accidental.Collection: Time
Now do you not see that the eye embraces the beauty of the whole world? It counsels and corrects all the arts of mankind... it is the prince of mathematics, and the sciences founded on it are absolutely certain. It has measured the distances and sizes of the stars it has discovered the elements and their location... it has given birth to architecture and to perspective and to the divine art of painting.Collection: Art
O painter skilled in anatomy, beware lest the undue prominence of the bones, sinews and muscles cause you to become a wooden painter from the desire to make your nude figures reveal all.Collection: Beauty
Never make heads straight on the shoulders, but turn them aside to the right or to the left, even though they look down, or upward, or straight ahead, because it is necessary for them to look lively and awake and not asleep. And do not depict the front or rear half of the whole person so that too much straightness is displaced, one half above or below the other half; and if you should wish to use stiff figures, do so only in portraying old people.Collection: People
Supreme happiness will be the greatest cause of misery, and the perfection of wisdom the occassion of folly.Collection: Perfection
Those who condemn the supreme certainty of mathematics feed on confusion, and can never silence the contradictions of the sophistical sciences which lead to eternal quackery.Collection: Inspirational
O speculators about perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you created in the like quest? Go and take your place with the seekers after gold.Collection: Gold
Those who become enamoured of the art, without having previously applied to the diligent study of the scientific part of it, may be compared to mariners who put to the sea in a ship without rudder or compass and therefore cannot be certain of arriving at the wished for port.Collection: Art
I am not to blame for putting forward, in the course of my work on science, any general rule derived from a previous conclusion.Collection: Blame
Here is a thing which the more you fear and avoid it the nearer you approach to it, and this is misery; the more you flee from it the more miserable and restless you will become.Collection: Misery
We may call painting the grandchild of nature.Collection: Grandchildren
In the days of thy youth seek to obtain that which shall compensate the losses of thy old age.Collection: Loss
Any color is more distinctly seen when opposed to its contrary: thus, black on white, blear near yellow, green near red, and so on.Collection: Color
Why are the bones of great fishes, and oysters and corals and various other shells and sea-snails, found on the high tops of mountains that border the sea, in the same way in which they are found in the depths of the sea?Collection: Science
Shadows which you see with difficulty, and whose boundaries you cannot define... these you should not represent as finished or sharply defined, for the result would be that your work would seem wooden.Collection: Light
I know very well that because I am unlettered some presumptuous people will think they have the right to criticize me, saying that I am an uncultured man. What stupid fools! Do they not know that I could reply to them as Marius did to the Roman patricians: "Do those who pride themselves on the works of other men claim to challenge mine?Collection: Education
Do not reveal, if liberty is precious to you; my face is the prison of love.Collection: Liberty
How painting surpasses all human works by reason of the subtle possibilities which it contains.Collection: Art
Why seek to embarrass [the artist] with vanities foreign to his quietness? Know you not that certain sciences require the whole man, leaving no part of him at leisure for your trifles?Collection: Artist
Weight is caused by one element being situated in another; and it moves by the shortest line towards its centre, not by its own choice, not because the centre draws it to itself, but because the other intervening element cannot withstand it.Collection: Nature
If you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry blind painting.Collection: Dumb
If we make mistakes in our first compositions and do not know them, we may not amend them.Collection: Mistake
Though I may not . . . be able to quote other authors, I shall rely on that which is much greater and more worthy - on experience.Collection: May
My works are the issue of simple and plain experience which is the true mistress.Collection: Simple
Avoid studies of which the result dies with the worker.Collection: Study
Sculptured figures which appear in motion, will, in their standing position, actually look as if they were falling forward.Collection: Fall
It is no small benefit on finding oneself in bed in the dark to go over again in the imagination the main lines of the forms previously studied, or other noteworthy things conceived by ingenious speculation.Collection: Dark
Perspective is to painting what the bridle is to the horse, the rudder to a ship.Collection: Horse
Let the painter composing narrative pictures take pleasure in wealth and variety, and avoid repeating any part that occurs in it, so that the uniqueness and abundance attract people to it and delight the eye of the observer. I say that a narrative painting requires (depending on the scene), wherever the eye falls, a mixture of men of diverse appearances, of diverse ages and dress, combined together with women, children, dogs, horses, buildings, fields, and hills.Collection: Dog
I have been impressed with the urgency of doing.Collection: Inspirational
I would venture to affirm that a man cannot attain excellence if he satisfy the ignorant and not those of his own craft, and if he be not 'singular' or 'distant,' or whatever you like to call him.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Eye
Nature has placed in the front part of man, as he moves, all those parts which when struck cause him to feel pain; and this is felt in the joints of the legs, the forehead and the nose, and has been so devised for the preservation of man, because if such pain were not felt in these limbs they would be destroyed by the many blows they receive.Collection: Pain
The fox when it sees a flock of herons or magpies or birds of that kind, suddenly flings himself on the ground with his mouth open to look as he were dead; and these birds want to peck at his tongue, and he bites off their heads.Collection: Bird
Oh! how foul a thing, that we should see the tongue of one animal in the guts of another.Collection: Animal
O time, swift robber of all created things, how many kings, how many nations hast thou undone, and how many changes of states and of various events have happened since the wondrous forms of this fish perished here in this cavernous and winding recess. Now destroyed by time thou liest patiently in this confined space with bones stripped and bare; serving as a support and prop for the superimposed mountain.Collection: Time
A good memory, which nature has endowed us with, causes things long past to seem present.Collection: Memories