Creativity Quote by Leonardo da Vinci

Marriage, in this framing, is less candlelight and more controlled hazard: you reach into a writhing bag of snakes gambling you will extract something smoother, rarer, edible. The line works because it refuses the usual romance vocabulary. Instead of vows and virtue, it gives you texture and reflexes: the involuntary flinch of skin meeting danger. It’s a metaphor designed to travel straight to the nervous system.

Da Vinci is an artist here, not a therapist, and the image behaves like a sketch: quick, economical, grotesquely vivid. Snakes aren’t just “bad outcomes”; they’re chaos, misrecognition, the way risk multiplies when you can’t see what you’re choosing. The eel, oddly specific, isn’t “true love” so much as the improbable prize - a single desired result hidden among many plausible injuries. That disproportion is the point. It’s not that marriage can’t work; it’s that expecting it to reliably yield the outcome you want is naive bordering on self-harm.

The subtext is also Renaissance-realistic. Marriage in da Vinci’s world was often an economic and familial instrument, a contract wrapped in ceremony. Personal compatibility, especially for someone whose life was defined by obsessive work and unconventional intimacies, could feel like an afterthought. The joke has teeth: society sells marriage as stability, but the chooser is effectively blindfolded, forced to perform optimism while handling peril.

It’s cynicism with painterly precision: desire reaching into darkness, hoping the world’s mess will come out compliant.