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Creativity Quote by Leonardo da Vinci

"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"

About this Quote

Da Vinci frames flight less as a feat of engineering than as a psychological point of no return: once you have experienced a new dimension of freedom, ordinary life becomes permanently reoriented. The line works because it turns “flight” into a sensory initiation, a taste that rewires desire. “Eyes turned skywards” isn’t just wonder; it’s a mild affliction, a new habit of looking that quietly indicts the ground as insufficient.

The subtext is classic Renaissance: human capability is expandable, and appetite grows with each expansion. Da Vinci isn’t romanticizing escapism so much as naming the cost of discovery. Break the boundary once and the old enclosure becomes visible forever. That longing “to return” reads like a blueprint for ambition itself: progress is propelled not by duty, but by nostalgia for the moment you first exceeded your limits.

Context sharpens the stakes. Da Vinci sketched flying machines centuries before powered flight, studying birds, airflow, and anatomy with an artist’s eye and an engineer’s obsession. In that world, flight was not an everyday metaphor; it was a speculative frontier, bordering on heresy and myth. So the sentence doubles as persuasion. It sells the idea that pursuing the impossible is not vanity but an inevitable human response to glimpsing a larger realm.

The intent, then, is to dignify obsession. If you’ve ever caught a glimpse of what could be, da Vinci suggests, you won’t be able to fully pretend you’re satisfied with what is.

Quote Details

TopicWanderlust
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Vinci, Leonardo da. (2026, January 15). 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. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/for-once-you-have-tasted-flight-you-will-walk-the-22366/

Chicago Style
Vinci, Leonardo da. "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." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/for-once-you-have-tasted-flight-you-will-walk-the-22366/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"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." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/for-once-you-have-tasted-flight-you-will-walk-the-22366/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci (April 15, 1452 - May 2, 1519) was a Artist from Italy.

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