Learning from Leonardo Quotes

“the modern notion that everybody in medieval times believed that the Earth was flat is no more than a popular cliché. In actual fact, most scholars, from antiquity to the Renaissance, knew that the Earth is spherical.”
― Fritjof Capra, Learning from Leonardo: Decoding the Notebooks of a Genius

“For Leonardo, the spiral form was the archetypal code for the ever-changing yet stable nature of living forms. He saw it in the growth patterns of plants and animals, in curling locks, in human movements and gestures, and above all in the swirling vortices of water and air. The movement of water is the grand unifying theme in Leonardo’s science of living forms. Water is the life-giving element flowing through the veins of the Earth and the blood vessels of the human body. It nourishes and sustains all living bodies. Its forms, like theirs, are fluid and always varying. It is a major source of power and for eons has shaped the surface of the living Earth, gradually turning arid rocks into fertile soil. With its infinite variety of form and movement—as rivers and tides, clouds and rain, cascades and currents, eddies and whirlpools—water flows through Leonardo’s art and interlinks the main fields of his science.”
― Fritjof Capra, Learning from Leonardo: Decoding the Notebooks of a Genius

“As I have suggested earlier, this fascination likely came from a deep and correct intuition that the dynamics of vortices, which combine stability and change, embody an essential characteristic of all living forms.”
― Fritjof Capra, Learning from Leonardo: Decoding the Notebooks of a Genius