Leonardo da Vinci Quotes

“Wisdom is the daughter of experience.”

“Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.”

“Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience, it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.”

“All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.”

“He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.”

“Science is the captain, and practice the soldiers.”

“The natural desire of good men is knowledge.”

“Good men by nature wish to know. I know that many will call this useless work, men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of wisdom, which is the food and only true riches of the mind.”

“The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.”

“Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament and food of the mind of man.”

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

“Learning acquired in youth arrests the evil of old age.”

“Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation; even so does inaction sap the vigour of the mind.”

“Time abides long enough for those who make use of it.”

“As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.”

“Life well spent is long.”

“While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.”

“In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.”

“Water is the driving force of all nature.”

“Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws; she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.”

“Nature never breaks her own laws.”

“Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.”

“The eye, which is called the window of the soul, is the principal means by which the mind can most completely and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of nature.”

“Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?”

“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”