"Those who are inspired by a model other than Nature, labor in vain."
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Quote collection
Leonardo da Vinci quotes (page 22 of 30)
583 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"To enjoy - to love a thing for its own sake and for no other reason."
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"When Fortune comes, seize her in front with a sure hand, because behind she is bald."
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"O sleepers! what a thing is slumber! Sleep resembles death. Ah, why then dost thou not work in such wise as that after death thou mayst retain a resemblance to perfect life, when, during life, thou art in sleep so like to the hapless dead?"
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"Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others."
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"Study me, reader, if you delight in me, because on very few occasions shall I return to the world, and because the patience for this profession is found in very few, and only in those who wish to compose things anew. Come, oh men, to see the miracles that such studies will disclose to nature."
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"Let proportion be found not only in numbers and measures, but also in sounds, weights, times, and positions, and what ever force there is."
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"After painting comes Sculpture, a very noble art, but one that does not in the execution require the same supreme ingenuity as the art of painting, since in two most important and difficult particulars, in foreshortening and in light and shade, for which the painter has to invent a process, sculpture is helped by nature. Moreover, Sculpture does not imitate color which the painter takes pains to attune so that the shadows accompany the lights."
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"Things that are separate shall be united and acquire such virtue that they will restore to man his lost memory."
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"In whatever system where the weight attached to the wheel should be the cause of motion of the wheel, without any doubt the center of the gravity of the weight will stop beneath the center of its axle. No instrument devised by human ingenuity, which turns with its wheel, can remedy this effect. Oh, speculators about perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you created in the like quest. Go and take you place with the seekers after gold."
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"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."
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"The organ of perception acts more readily than judgment."
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"I say that the power of vision extends through the visual rays to the surface of non-transparent bodies, while the power possessed by these bodies extends to the power of vision."
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"In an atmosphere of uniform density the most distant things seen through it, such as the mountains, in consequence of the great quantity of atmosphere which is between your eye and them, will appear blue. Therefore you should make the building... wall which is more distant less defined and bluer... five times as far away, make five times as blue."
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"The painter must be solitary. For if you are alone you are completely yourself, but if you are accompanied by a single companion, you are only half yourself."
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"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."
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"A man of supreme folly: his life flies away while he is merely hoping to enjoy it."
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"One's thoughts turn towards Hope."
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"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."
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"The motions of men must be such as suggest their dignity or their baseness."
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