Leonardo da Vinci

The deeper the feeling, the greater the pain.

Learning never exhausts the mind.

A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.

For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards for there you have been and there you will long to return.

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Being willing is not enough, we must do.

Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.

Life well spent is long.

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes, so with present time.

You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.

All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.

The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.

Iron rusts from disuse, water loses its purity from stagnation... even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things and far below the musician in that of invisible things.

Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.

Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.