Creativity Quote by Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo flips the expected hierarchy: the tidy, armchair primacy of “reason” bows to the messier authority of what the eye and hand can verify. The line is a quiet rebuke to his era’s scholastic habits, when inherited explanations often arrived prepackaged and observation was invited only to decorate the conclusion. He’s not anti-intellectual; he’s staging a coup inside intellect itself. Start with experience, he insists, because nature doesn’t care about your syllogisms.

The phrasing matters. “Nature commences with reason and ends in experience” suggests a world that is coherent underneath, a system whose logic cashes out in observable effects. But “it is necessary for us to do the opposite” admits a human limitation: we don’t get to see the blueprint. We approach reality from the outside, through sensory fragments, and only then build a model sturdy enough to be called “reason.” It’s an artist’s epistemology that doubles as proto-scientific method: sketch first, theorize second.

Context sharpens the intent. Leonardo lived amid a Renaissance hunger to reconcile classical authority with new forms of seeing: perspective, anatomy, hydraulics, flight. His notebooks read like a workshop where drawing is data collection. The subtext is almost polemical: if you want truth, stop auditioning clever explanations and start doing the work of looking. Experience isn’t inspiration here; it’s discipline, a demand that ideas earn their keep against the stubborn, measurable world.