Leonardo Da Vinci

O Lord, thou givest us everything, at the price of an effort.

Every action done by nature is done in the shortest way.

Nature alone is the master of true genius.

Mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences because by means of it one comes to the fruits of mathematics.

O painter skilled in anatomy, beware lest the undue prominence of the bones, sinews and muscles cause you to become a wooden painter from the desire to make your nude figures reveal all.

The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.

I have found that, in the composition of the human body as compared with the bodies of animals, the organs of sense are duller and coarser. Thus, it is composed of less ingenious instruments, and of spaces less capacious for receiving the faculties of sense.

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.

Science is the captain, and practice the soldiers.

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature. Necessity is the theme and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law.

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.

As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.

Intellectual passion dries out sensuality.

Beauty perishes in life, but is immortal in art.

The greatest geniuses sometimes accomplish more when they work less.

It is no small benefit on finding oneself in bed in the dark to go over again in the imagination the main lines of the forms previously studied, or other noteworthy things conceived by ingenious speculation.

The faculty of imagination is both the rudder and the bridle of the senses.

All our knowledge originates in opinion.

Small rooms or dwellings discipline the mind, large ones weaken it.