Leonardo da Vinci (15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame initially rested on his achievements as a painter, he has also become known for his notebooks, in which he made drawings and notes on a variety of subjects, including anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and paleontology. Leonardo is widely regarded to have been a genius who epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal,and his collective works comprise a contribution to later generations of artists matched only by that of his younger contemporary Michelangelo.
Here are some of Leonardo da Vinci's most notable quotes:
1. "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."
2. "Learning never exhausts the mind."
3. "Art is never finished, only abandoned."
4. "The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding."
5. "Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art."
6. "The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art."
7. "I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do."
8. "The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions."
9. "Water is the driving force of all nature."
10. "As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death."
11. "Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it."
12. "Nature never breaks her own laws."
13. "Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in."
14. "As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself."
15. "While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die."
16. "The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands."
17. "Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind."
18. "Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind."
19. "He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards a ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast."
20. "Nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first understood."