Leonardo da Vinci

1452–1519 · Italian Renaissance polymath

Topics: learning, physics, mathematics, creativity

• The point, being indivisible, occupies no space. That which occupies no space is nothing. The limiting surface of one thing is the beginning of another.

  — Leonardo da Vinci

• Nothing is that which fills no space.

  — Leonardo da Vinci

• The Book of the science of Mechanics must precede the Book of useful inventions.

  — Leonardo da Vinci

• Of several luminous bodies of equal size and brilliancy and at an equal distance, that will look the largest which is surrounded by the darkest background.

  — Leonardo da Vinci

• Nature is full of infinite causes which were never set forth in experience.

  — Leonardo da Vinci

• All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions.

  — Leonardo da Vinci

• Science, knowledge of the things that are possible present and past; prescience, knowledge of the things which may come to pass.

  — Leonardo da Vinci

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

  — Leonardo da Vinci

• Necessity is the theme and the inventress, the eternal curb and law of nature.

  — Leonardo da Vinci

• What is fair in men, passes away, but not so in art.

  — Leonardo da Vinci

• Observe the light and consider its beauty. Blink your eye and look at it. That which you see was not there at first, and that which was there is there no more.

  — Leonardo da Vinci

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

  — Leonardo da Vinci

• Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass, though but slowly.

  — Leonardo da Vinci

• Light is the chaser away of darkness. Shade is the obstruction of light.

  — Leonardo da Vinci

• All the rays which convey the images of objects through the air are straight lines. Hence, if the images of very large bodies have to pass through very small holes, and beyond these holes recover their large size, the lines must necessarily intersect.

  — Leonardo da Vinci

• Science is the captain, and practice the soldiers.

  — Leonardo da Vinci

• Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.

  — Leonardo da Vinci

• Experience, the interpreter between formative nature and the human race, teaches how that nature acts among mortals; and being constrained by necessity cannot act otherwise than as reason, which is its helm, requires her to act.

  — Leonardo da Vinci

• Experience does not err; only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power.

  — Leonardo da Vinci

• The water which rises in the mountain is the blood which keeps the mountain in life.

  — Leonardo da Vinci