Link Copied!
Leonardo da Vinci Quotes (1452-1519)
Poet, Musician, Painter
-100px.png)
About Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519) was an Italian Renaissance painter, architect, inventor, engineer, sculptor, and musician. His best known painting is the Mona Lisa.
Best Leonardo da Vinci Quotes
Shortest
Earliest
Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Leonardo da Vinci quotes.
“Movement will fail sooner than usefulness.”
“Intellectual passion drives out sensuality.”
“Wine is good, but water is preferable at table.”
“Every instrument requires to be made by experience.”
“All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions.”
“Threats alone are the weapons of the threatened man.”
Leonardo da Vinci Quotes by Topic
Find exactly what you are looking for by browsing this categorized list of Leonardo da Vinci quotes by topic.
Leonardo da Vinci on Time 7 quotes
View all 7 quotes on Time →Leonardo da Vinci on Truth 6 quotes
View all 6 quotes on Truth →Leonardo da Vinci on Love 5 quotes
View all 5 quotes on Love →Leonardo da Vinci on Wild animal suffering 5 quotes
“[N]ature appears with many animals to have been rather a cruel stepmother than a mother, and with others not a stepmother, but a most tender mother”
Leonardo da Vinci on Necessity 4 quotes
View all 4 quotes on Necessity →Leonardo da Vinci on Fire 3 quotes
“Fire destroys all sophistry, that is deceit; and maintains truth alone, that is gold.”
Leonardo da Vinci on Dreams 3 quotes
“Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than with the imagination being awake?”
Leonardo da Vinci on Lying 3 quotes
“Fire is to represent truth because it destroys all sophistry and lies; and the mask is for lying and falsehood which conceal truth.”
Leonardo da Vinci on Mirror 3 quotes
“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 on Painting 3 quotes
“Take a piece of glass of the size of a half sheet of royal folio paper, and fix it... between your eye and the object you wish to portray. Then move it away until your eye is two-thirds of a braccio away from the piece of glass, and fasten your head by means of an instrument in such a way as to prevent any movement of it whatsoever. Then close or cover up one eye, and with a brush or a piece of red chalk finely ground mark out on the glass what is visible beyond it; afterwards, copy it by tracing on paper from the glass, then prick it out upon paper of a better quality and paint it if you so desire, paying special attention to the aerial perspective.”
Leonardo da Vinci on Nature 2 quotes
“A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.”
Leonardo da Vinci on Vegetarianism 2 quotes
“(Of the mouth of man which is a tomb) there shall come forth loud noises out of the tombs of those who have died by an evil and violent death.”
Quotes About Leonardo da Vinci
Gain deeper perspective through quotes about Leonardo da Vinci from others.
Fritjof Capra on Leonardo da Vinci 2 quotes
“Studying Leonardo... will not only allow us to recognize his science as a solid body of knowledge. It will also show why it cannot be understood without his art, nor his art without the science.”
Kenneth Clark on Leonardo da Vinci
Lewis Einstein on Leonardo da Vinci 3 quotes
“The genius of Leonardo as a painter came through unfolding the mystery of life..."Look at the grace and sweetness of men and women in the street," he wrote. The most ordinary functions of life and nature amazed him most. He observed of the eye how in it form and colour, and the entire universe it reflected, were reduced to a single point. "Wonderful law of nature, which forced all effects to participate with their cause in the mind of man. These are the true miracles!" Elsewhere he wrote again: "Nature is full of infinite reasons which have not yet passed into experience."”
Mauro Gatti on Leonardo da Vinci
“He conceived it to be the painter's duty not only to comment on natural phenomena as restrained by law, but to merge his very mind into that of nature by interpreting its relation with art... The whole world was full of a mystery to him, which his work reflected. The smile of consciousness, pregnant of that which is beyond, illumines the expression of Dino Lisa.”
Sigmund Freud on Leonardo da Vinci
Eric Kandel on Leonardo da Vinci
“Much as Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance artists used the revelations of human anatomy to help them depict the body more accurately and compellingly, so, too, many contemporary artists may create new forms of representation in response to revelations about how the brain works.”
Morris Kline on Leonardo da Vinci 3 quotes
“Incredibly endowed both physically and mentally, he achieved greatness as a linguist, botanist, zoologist, anatomist, geologist, musician, sculptor, painter, architect, inventor, and engineer. Leonardo made quite a point of distrusting the knowledge that scholars professed so dogmatically. These men of book learning he described as strutting about puffed up and pompous, adorned not by their own labors but by the labors of others whose work they merely repeated... they did not deal with the real world.”
Edward MacCurdy on Leonardo da Vinci
“What thinker has ever possessed the cosmic vision so insistently? He sought to establish the essential unity of structure of all living things, the earth an organism with veins and arteries, the body of a man a type of that of the world.”
Anna Margolin "From a Diary" short story on Leonardo da Vinci
Sherwin B. Nuland on Leonardo da Vinci
“The more the manuscripts of Leonardo are studied, the more one begins to see him not so much as a transcendent artist, but primarily as a man of science, whose skills and commissions as an artist and engineer enabled him to support his fascination with nature.”
Rebecca Solnit on Leonardo da Vinci
Disputed Quotes
Quotes attributed to Leonardo da Vinci that are questionable.
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Misattributed Quotes
Quotes mistakenly credited to Leonardo da Vinci
About Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519) was an Italian Renaissance painter, architect, inventor, engineer, sculptor, and musician. His best known painting is the Mona Lisa.