The Notebooks of Leonardo DaVinci

Those who are in love with practice without knowledge are like the sailor who gets into a ship without rudder or compass and who never can be certain whether he is going

We know very well that errors are better recognised in the works of others than in our own; and that often, while reproving little faults in others, you may ignore great ones in yourself

The sorest misfortune is when your views are in advance of your work.

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.

The sorest misfortune is when your views are in advance of your work.

Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight, which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Colour, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest. This little work of mine will be a tissue [of the studies] of these attributes, reminding the painter of the rules and methods by which he should use his art to imitate all the works of Nature which adorn the world.

Every evil leaves behind a grief in our memory, except the supreme evil, that is death, which destroys this memory together with life.

declaimers of the works of others, must be regarded and not otherwise esteemed than as the object in front of a mirror, when compared with its image seen in the mirror. For the first is something in itself, and the other nothingness – folks little indebted to Nature, since it is only by chance that they wear the human form and without it I might class them with the herds of beasts.

The sorest misfortune is when your views are in advance of your work

And if you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry blind painting. Now which is the worse defect? To be blind or dumb?