Leonardo Da Vinci

Italian engineer, painter, & sculptor (1452 - 1519)

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

Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but memory.

Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.

When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.

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

Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigors 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.

Blinding ignorance does mislead us.
O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!

It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.

Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.