Leonardo Da Vinci

Vitality and beauty are gifts of Nature for those who live according to its laws.

Small rooms or dwellings set the mind in the right path, large ones cause it to go astray.

Patience serves us against insults precisely as clothes do against the cold. For if you multiply your garments as the cold increases, that cold cannot hurt you; in the same way increase your patience under great offenses, and they cannot hurt your feelings.

The smallest feline is a masterpiece.

For, verily, great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it, you will be able to love it only little or not at all.

It is a far worthier thing to read by the light of experience than to adorn oneself with the labors of others.

The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.

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

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.

Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament and food of the mind of man.

The human bird shall take his first flight, filling the world with amazement, all writings with his fame, and bringing eternal glory to the nest whence he sprang.

Experience is a truer guide than the words of others.

Just as eating against one's will is injurious to health, so studying without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.

Tears come from the heart and not from the brain

All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.

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.

There shall be wings! If the accomplishment be not for me, 'tis for some other. The spirit cannot die; and man, who shall know all and shall have wings.

A bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law, which instrument it is within the capacity of man to reproduce with all its movements, but not with a corresponding degree of strength, though it is deficient only in the power of maintaining equilibrium. We may therefore say that such an instrument constructed by man is lacking in nothing except the life of the bird, and this life must needs be supplied from that of man.

Lust is the cause of generation_x000D_ _x000D_ Appetite is the support of life_x000D_ _x000D_ Fear or timidity is the prolongation of life, and_x000D_ _x000D_ Fraud the preservation of its instruments.

Man and the animals are merely a passage and channel for food, a tomb for other animals, a haven for the dead, giving life by the death of others, a coffer full of corruption.

One has no right to love or hate anything if one has not acquired a thorough knowledge of its nature. Great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you know it but little you will be able to love it only a little or not at all.