Quotes from Leonardo da Vinci

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

I prefer death to lassitude. I never tire of serving others.

The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.

Therefore O students study mathematics and do not build without foundations.

Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places! I have since an early age abjured the use of meat.

Go some distance away because the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance, and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.

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

Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses it purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot.

O speculators about perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you created in the like quest? Go and take your place with the seekers after gold.

Even the richest soil, if left uncultivated will produce the rankest weeds.

O neglectful Nature, wherefore art thou thus partial, becoming to some of thy children a tender and benignant mother, to others a most cruel and ruthless stepmother? I see thy children given into slavery to others without ever receiving any benefit, and in lieu of any reward for the services they have done for them they are repaid by the severest punishments.

Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds theirs. We live by the death of others: we are burial places! I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.

Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but rather memory.

Savage is he who saves himself.

The Medici created and destroyed me.

I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand.

Irons rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

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

Water is the driving force of all nature.

Shun those studies in which the work that results dies with the worker.

Life well spent is long.

Mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences because by means of it one comes to the fruits of mathematics.

The art of procreation and the members employed therein are so repulsive, that if it were not for the beauty of the faces and the adornments of the actors and the pent-up impulse, nature would lose the human species.