Quotes from Leonardo da Vinci

Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.

To develop a complete mind: Study the science of art; Study the art of science. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.

Details make perfection, and perfection is not a detail.

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

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.

As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.

The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard.

Truth at last cannot be hidden. Dissimulation is of no avail. Dissimulation is to no purpose before so great a judge. Falsehood puts on a mask. Nothing is hidden under the sun.

Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.

The mind that engages in subjects of too great variety becomes confused and weakened.

While human ingenuity may devise various inventions to the same ends, it will never devise anything more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than nature does, because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.

He is a poor pupil who does not go beyond his master.

If you find from your own experience that something is a fact and it contradicts what some authority has written down, then you must abandon the authority and base your reasoning on your own findings.

Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind. So we must stretch ourselves to the very limits of human possibility. Anything less is a sin against both God and man.

The worst evil which can befall the artist is that his work should appear good in his own eyes.

Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places.

He who truly knows has no occasion to shout.

A well-spent day brings happy sleep

Having wandered some distance among gloomy rocks, I came to the entrance of a great cavern ... Two contrary emotions arose in me: fear and desire--fear of the threatening dark cavern, desire to see whether there were any marvelous things in it.

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.

He who can copy can do.

Those who, in debate, appeal to their qualifications, argue from memory, not from understanding.

It is an acknowledged fact that we perceive errors in the work of others more readily than in our own.

To become an artist you have to be curious.