Leonardo's Notebooks Quotes

“All sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of Experience, the mother of all Knowledge.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo's Notebooks

“I awoke only to find that the rest of the world was still asleep.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo's Notebooks

“Man has much power of discourse which for the most part is vain and false; animals have but little, but it is useful and true, and a small truth is better than a great lie.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci

“Men fight wars and destroy everything around them. The earth should open and swallow them up. He who does not value life does not deserve it. Never destroy another life through rage, or through malice.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo's Notebooks: Writing and Art of the Great Master

“The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present.
Life, if well spent, is long.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo's Notebooks

“The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use. But the bee gathers its materials from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo's Notebooks

“For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo's Notebooks

“If the painter wishes to see beauties that charm him, it lies in his power to create them, and if he wishes to see monstrosities that are frightful, ridiculous, or truly pitiable, he is lord and God thereof.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo's Notebooks

“Those who fall in love with practice without science are like a sailor who enters a ship without a helm or a compass, and who never can be certain whither he is going.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo's Notebooks

“The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies every thing placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci Complete

“It is as great an error to speak well of a worthless man as to speak ill of a good man.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo's Notebooks: Writing and Art of the Great Master

“No counsel is more trustworthy than that which is given upon ships that are in peril.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo's Notebooks: Writing and Art of the Great Master

“Nitre, vitriol, cinnabar, alum, salt ammoniac, sublimated mercury, rock salt, alcali salt, common salt, rock alum, alum schist, arsenic, sublimate, realgar, tartar, orpiment, verdegris.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo's Notebooks

“When the fig-tree stood without fruit no one looked at it. Wishing by producing this fruit be praised by men, it was bent and broken by them.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo's Notebooks

“I am fully conscious that, not being a literary man , certain presumptuous persons will think that they may reasonably blame me; alleging that I am not a man of letters. Foolish folks! do they not know that I might retort as Marius did to the Roman Patricians by saying: That they, who deck themselves out in the labours of others will not allow me my own. They will say that I, having no literary skill, cannot properly express that which I desire to treat of, but they do not know that my subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words; and experience has been the mistress of those who wrote well. And so, as mistress, I will cite her in all cases.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo's Notebooks

“O Time, consumer of all things! O envious age, thou destroyest all things and devourest all things with the hard teeth of the years little by little, in slow death. Helen, when she looked in her mirror and saw the withered wrinkles which old age had made in her face wept and wondered why she had twice been carried away.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo's Notebooks

“In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes: so with time present.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci

“Creatures shall be seen on the earth who will always be fighting one another, with the greatest losses and frequent deaths on either side. There will be no bounds to their malice; by their strong limbs the vast forests of the world shall be laid low; and when they are filled with food they shall gratify their desires by dealing out death, affliction, labour, terror, and banishment to every living thing; and then from their boundless pride they will desire to rise towards heaven, but the excessive weight of their limbs will hold them down. Nothing shall remain on the earth or under the earth or in the waters that shall not be pursued, disturbed, or spoiled, and that which is in one country removed into another. And their bodies shall be made the tomb and the means of transit of all the living bodies they have slain.
O earth, why do you not open and hurl them into the deep fissures of thy vast abysses and caverns, and no longer display in the sight of heaven so cruel and horrible a monster?”
― Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo's Notebooks

“But leaves of yellowish green do not, when they reflect the atmosphere, create a reflection which verges on blue; for every object when seen in a mirror takes part in the color of this mirror; therefore the blue of the atmosphere reflected in the yellow of the leaf appears green, because blue and yellow mixed together form the most brilliant green, and therefore luster on light leaves which are yellowish in color will be a greenish yellow.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo's Notebooks

“Qui non estima la vita non la merita.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo's Notebooks

“Certainly it seems that nature desires to exterminate the human race, as a thing useless to the world, and the destroyer of all created things.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci

“For I know that there are numberless people who, in order to gratify one of their appetites, would destroy God and the whole of the universe. If this art has never remained among men, although so necessary to them, it never existed, and never will exist.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci