Quotes from Leonardo da Vinci

Man has much power of discourse which for the most part is vain and false; animals have but little, but it is useful and true, and a small truth is better than a great lie.

To lie is vile, to tell truth is excellent, if not noble.

Slender certainty is better than portentous falsehood.

Truth was always but the daughter of time.

Fire is to represent truth because it destroys all sophistry and lies; and the mask is for lying and falsehood which conceal truth.

Love, Fear, and Esteem, - Write these on three stones.

To enjoy - to love a thing for its own sake and for no other reason.

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.

He who despises painting has no love for the philosophy in nature.

Whatever you do in life, if you want to be creative and intelligent, and develop your brain, you must do everything with the awareness that everything, in some way, connects to everything else.

As you cannot do what you want, Want what you can do

For, verily, great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it, you will be able to love it only little or not at all.

Just as food eaten without appetite is a tedious nourishment, so does study without zeal damage the memory by not assimilating what it absorbs.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

Science is the captain, and practice the soldiers.

Oh Lord, thou givest us everything, at the price of an effort.

A well-spent day brings happy sleep.

How many emperors and how many princes have lived and died and no record of them remains, and they only sought to gain dominions and riches in order that their fame might be ever-lasting.

The common sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

Obstacles cannot crush me, every obstacle yields to stern resolve.

He turns not back who is bound to a star.

A good painter is to paint two main things, namely men and the working of man's mind.

As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.