Facts about Leonardo da Vinci

"The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding"

"The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things"

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"

"The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue"

"I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but they whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue their principles unto death"

"I have wasted my hours"

"I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have"

"I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do"

"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"

"He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year"

"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"

"He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind"

"For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return"

"Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power"

"Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses"

"Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!"

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

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

"As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death"

"Art is never finished, only abandoned"

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

"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"

"A well-spent day brings happy sleep"

"You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself"

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

"Who sows virtue reaps honor"

"While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die"

"Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge"

"Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art"

"Water is the driving force of all nature"

"Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it"

"There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see"

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

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

"Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else"

"Learning never exhausts the mind"

"Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it"

"It's easier to resist at the beginning than at the end"

"It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things"

"Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation... even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind"

"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"

"Life well spent is long"

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