Leonardo's Notebooks Quotes

All sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of Experience, the mother of all Knowledge.

I awoke only to find that the rest of the world was still asleep.

Man has much power of discourse which for the most part is vain and false; animals have but little, but it is useful and true, and a small truth is better than a great lie.

Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his Notebooks: “It should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud or like places in which … you may find really marvelous ideas.

Men fight wars and destroy everything around them. The earth should open and swallow them up. He who does not value life does not deserve it. Never destroy another life through rage, or through malice.

The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present. Life, if well spent, is long.

If there's no love, what then?

Reading list (1972 edition)[edit] 1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus – Tragedies 4. Sophocles – Tragedies 5. Herodotus – Histories 6. Euripides – Tragedies 7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings 9. Aristophanes – Comedies 10. Plato – Dialogues 11. Aristotle – Works 12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus 13. Euclid – Elements 14. Archimedes – Works 15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections 16. Cicero – Works 17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil – Works 19. Horace – Works 20. Livy – History of Rome 21. Ovid – Works 22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia 23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic 25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion 26. Ptolemy – Almagest 27. Lucian – Works 28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus – The Enneads 32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine 33. The Song of Roland 34. The Nibelungenlied 35. The Saga of Burnt Njál 36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica 37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy 38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales 39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Thomas More – Utopia 44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises 45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion 47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays 48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies 49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene 51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis 52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays 53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences 54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World 55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals 56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan 57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy 58. John Milton – Works 59. Molière – Comedies 60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises 61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light 62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics 63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies 65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology 67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe 68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal 69. William Congreve – The Way of the World 70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge 71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man 72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws 73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary 74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones 75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use. But the bee gathers its materials from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.

If the painter wishes to see beauties that charm him, it lies in his power to create them, and if he wishes to see monstrosities that are frightful, ridiculous, or truly pitiable, he is lord and God thereof.

Those who fall in love with practice without science are like a sailor who enters a ship without a helm or a compass, and who never can be certain whither he is going.

It is as great an error to speak well of a worthless man as to speak ill of a good man.

For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.

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.

Nitre, vitriol, cinnabar, alum, salt ammoniac, sublimated mercury, rock salt, alcali salt, common salt, rock alum, alum schist, arsenic, sublimate, realgar, tartar, orpiment, verdegris.

No counsel is more trustworthy than that which is given upon ships that are in peril.

When the fig-tree stood without fruit no one looked at it. Wishing by producing this fruit be praised by men, it was bent and broken by them.

Whatever— the soup is getting cold. [Last sentence of a mathematical theorem in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook, 1518]

In notes for his treatise on painting, Leonardo recommended to young artists this practice of walking around town, finding people to use as models, and recording the most interesting ones in a portable notebook: “Take a note of them with slight strokes in a little book which you should always carry with you,” he wrote. “The positions of the people are so infinite that the memory is incapable of retaining them, which is why you should keep these sketches as your guides.”22

In Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks, we read: "An oyster opens wide at full moon. When the crab sees this, it throws a pebble or a twig at the oyster to keep it from closing and thus have it to feed upon." Da Vinci adds the following suitable moral to this fable: "Like the mouth that, in telling its secret, places itself at the mercy of an indiscreet listener.

I am fully conscious that, not being a literary man , certain presumptuous persons will think that they may reasonably blame me; alleging that I am not a man of letters. Foolish folks! do they not know that I might retort as Marius did to the Roman Patricians by saying: That they, who deck themselves out in the labours of others will not allow me my own. They will say that I, having no literary skill, cannot properly express that which I desire to treat of, but they do not know that my subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words; and experience has been the mistress of those who wrote well. And so, as mistress, I will cite her in all cases.

O Time, consumer of all things! O envious age, thou destroyest all things and devourest all things with the hard teeth of the years little by little, in slow death. Helen, when she looked in her mirror and saw the withered wrinkles which old age had made in her face wept and wondered why she had twice been carried away.

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

One purpose of these notebooks was to record interesting scenes, especially those involving people and emotions. “As you go about town,” he wrote in one of them, “constantly observe, note, and consider the circumstances and behavior of men as they talk and quarrel, or laugh, or come to blows.”1 For that purpose, he kept a small notebook hanging from his belt.

When Leonardo da Vinci wanted to create a whole new style of painting, one that was more lifelike and emotional, he engaged in an obsessive study of details. He spent endless hours experimenting with forms of light hitting various geometrical solids, to test how light could alter the appearance of objects. He devoted hundreds of pages in his notebooks to exploring the various gradations of shadows in every possible combination. He gave this same attention to the folds of a gown, the patterns in hair, the various minute changes in the expression of a human face. When we look at his work we are not consciously aware of these efforts on his part, but we feel how much more alive and realistic his paintings are, as if he had captured reality.

Kenneth Clark referred to Leonardo’s “inhumanly sharp eye.” It’s a nice phrase, but misleading. Leonardo was human. The acuteness of his observational skill was not some superpower he possessed. Instead, it was a product of his own effort. That’s important, because it means that we can, if we wish, not just marvel at him but try to learn from him by pushing ourselves to look at things more curiously and intensely. In his notebook, he described his method—almost like a trick—for closely observing a scene or object: look carefully and separately at each detail. He compared it to looking at the page of a book, which is meaningless when taken in as a whole and instead needs to be looked at word by word. Deep observation must be done in steps: “If you wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects, begin with the details of them, and do not go on to the second step until you have the first well fixed in memory.

At times Leonardo was troubled by his lack of achievement. As a young man he appears to have developed a reputation for melancholia. “Leonardo,” wrote a friend, “why so troubled?” A sad refrain runs through his notebooks: “Tell me if anything was ever done,” he often sighs. Or in another place: “Tell me if ever I did a thing.

If the poet says that he can inflame men with love, which is the central aim in all animal species, the painter has the power to do the same, and to an even greater degree, in that he can place in front of the lover the true likeness of that which is beloved, often making him kiss and speak to it. —LEONARDO DA VINCI, Notebooks

Qui non estima la vita non la merita.

Certainly it seems that nature desires to exterminate the human race, as a thing useless to the world, and the destroyer of all created things.

When wine is drunk by a drunkard, that wine is revenged on the drinker. Leonardo Da Vinci Notebooks, 1281

Leonardo said so himself. “Intellectual passion drives out sensuality,” he wrote in one of his notebooks.

His notebooks have been rightly called “the most astonishing testament to the powers of human observation and imagination ever set down on paper.

Most notably, he was known for his willingness to share his blessings. “He was so generous that he sheltered and fed all his friends, rich or poor,” according to Vasari. He was not motivated by wealth or material possessions. In his notebooks, he decried “men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of the desire for wisdom, which is the sustenance and truly dependable wealth of the mind.”2 As a result, he spent more time pursuing wisdom than working on jobs that would make him money beyond what he needed to support his growing household retinue. “He possessed nothing and worked little, but he always kept servants and horses,” Vasari wrote. The horses brought him “much delight,” Vasari wrote, as did all animals.

The “inkblot” test devised by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach. The shape of the blot can serve as a stimulus for free association; in fact, almost any irregular free shape can spark off the associative process. Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his Notebooks: “It should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud or like places in which … you may find really marvelous ideas.

On what may be the last page he wrote in his notebooks, Leonardo drew four right triangles with bases of differing lengths (fig. 143). Inside of each he fit a rectangle, and then he shaded the remaining areas of the triangle. In the center of the page he made a chart with boxes labeled with the letter of each rectangle, and below it he described what he was trying to accomplish. As he had done obsessively over the years, he was using the visualization of geometry to help him understand the transformation of shapes. Specifically, he was trying to understand the formula for keeping the area of a right triangle the same while varying the lengths of its two legs. He had fussed with this problem, explored by Euclid, repeatedly over the years. It was a puzzle that, by this point in his life, as he turned sixty-seven and his health faded, might seem unnecessary to solve. To anyone other than Leonardo, it may have been.

It’s amazing — and poignant — to think that Leonardo (da Vinci)did consider himself as something of a failure. He didn’t believe that he had achieved everything he might have done. His notebooks have a repeated refrain: 'Tell me if I ever did a thing.

For I know that there are numberless people who, in order to gratify one of their appetites, would destroy God and the whole of the universe. If this art has never remained among men, although so necessary to them, it never existed, and never will exist.

Leonardo was experimenting with the trick known as anamorphosis, in which some elements of a work may look distorted when viewed straight on but appear accurate when viewed from another angle. Leonardo occasionally made sketches of the technique in his notebooks.

His unstoppable curiosity triumphed, and Leonardo went into the cave. There he discovered, embedded in the wall, a fossil whale. “Oh mighty and once-living instrument of nature,” he wrote, “your vast strength was to no avail.”26 Some scholars have assumed that he was describing a fantasy hike or riffing on some verses by Seneca. But his notebook page and those surrounding it are filled with descriptions of layers of fossil shells, and many fossilized whale bones have in fact been discovered in Tuscany.27 The whale fossil triggered

when he was engaged in blue-sky thinking, his science was not a separate endeavor from his art. Together they served his driving passion, which was nothing less than knowing everything there was to know about the world, including how we fit into it. He had a reverence for the wholeness of nature and a feel for the harmony of its patterns, which he saw replicated in phenomena large and small. In his notebooks he would record curls of hair, eddies of water, and whirls of air, along with some stabs at the math that might underlie such spirals. While at Windsor Castle looking at the swirling power of the “Deluge drawings” that he made near the end of his life, I asked the curator, Martin Clayton, whether he thought Leonardo had done them as works of art or of science. Even as I spoke, I realized it was a dumb question. “I do not think that Leonardo would have made that distinction,” he replied.

He was able to avoid pedantry by regularly bringing his theories down to earth, so to speak, and tying them to practical applications. As he instructed himself in a typical notebook jotting, “When you put together the science of the motions of water, remember to include under each proposition its application, in order that this science may not be useless.”15

A good painter has two chief objects to paint, man and the intention of his soul; the former is easy, the latter hard, because he has to represent it by the attitudes and movements of the limbs…The most important consideration in painting is that the movements of each figure expresses its mental state, such as desire, scorn, anger, pity, and the like. - quoted from Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks

In collecting such a medley of ideas, Leonardo was following a practice that had become popular in Renaissance Italy of keeping a commonplace and sketch book, known as a zibaldone. But in their content, Leonardo’s were like nothing the world had ever, or has ever, seen. His notebooks have been rightly called “the most astonishing testament to the powers of human observation and imagination ever set down on paper.”3

Europe in the fifteenth century and become such a nuisance in Milan that they were banished by a decree in 1493. In his notebooks, Leonardo mentioned a portrayal of a gypsy in a list of his drawings, and he also recorded spending 6 soldi for a fortune-teller. All of this is speculative, and that is one of the many things that make Leonardo’s works, including those with a bit of mystery, so wonderful: his fantasia is infectious.

One purpose of these notebooks was to record interesting scenes, especially those involving people and emotions. “As you go about town,” he wrote in one of them, “constantly observe, note, and consider the circumstances and behavior of men as they talk and quarrel, or laugh, or come to blows.”1 For that purpose, he kept a small notebook hanging from his belt. According to the poet Giovanni Battista Giraldi, whose father knew Leonardo:

But leaves of yellowish green do not, when they reflect the atmosphere, create a reflection which verges on blue; for every object when seen in a mirror takes part in the color of this mirror; therefore the blue of the atmosphere reflected in the yellow of the leaf appears green, because blue and yellow mixed together form the most brilliant green, and therefore luster on light leaves which are yellowish in color will be a greenish yellow.

The front of the white lectern has a slight blue tinge, since it is lit mainly by the refracted light of the sky rather than the yellowish direct glow of the setting sun.59 “Shadows will vary,” Leonardo explained in his notebooks. “The side of an object that receives a reflected light from the azure of the air will be tinged with that hue, and this is particularly observable in white objects. That side that receives the light from the sun will partake of that color.

Why would a person whose notebook aphorisms decry killing and whose personal morality led him to be a vegetarian go to work for the most brutal murderer of the era? Partly this choice reflects Leonardo’s pragmatism. In a land where the Medici, Sforzas, and Borgias jostled for power, Leonardo was able to time his patronage affiliations well and know when to move on. But there is more. Even as he remained aloof from most current events, he seemed to be attracted to power.

We are witnessing the physical and mental response, including amazement and reverence and curiosity, to an epiphany. Only the Virgin seems still, the calm in the vortex. Portraying the swirl of characters was a daunting task, perhaps too much so. Each had to have a unique pose and set of emotions. As Leonardo later wrote in his notebook, “Do not repeat the same movements in the same figure, be it limbs, hands or fingers, nor should the same pose be repeated in one narrative painting.

Creatures shall be seen on the earth who will always be fighting one another, with the greatest losses and frequent deaths on either side. There will be no bounds to their malice; by their strong limbs the vast forests of the world shall be laid low; and when they are filled with food they shall gratify their desires by dealing out death, affliction, labour, terror, and banishment to every living thing; and then from their boundless pride they will desire to rise towards heaven, but the excessive weight of their limbs will hold them down. Nothing shall remain on the earth or under the earth or in the waters that shall not be pursued, disturbed, or spoiled, and that which is in one country removed into another. And their bodies shall be made the tomb and the means of transit of all the living bodies they have slain. O earth, why do you not open and hurl them into the deep fissures of thy vast abysses and caverns, and no longer display in the sight of heaven so cruel and horrible a monster?

The fables are pithy moral tales involving animals or objects that take on a personality. They have common themes, most notably the rewards due to virtue and prudence versus the penalties engendered by greed and haste. Although they bear some similarity to Aesop’s fables, they are shorter. Most are not particularly clever or even easily comprehensible, at least out of the context of whatever was happening at court that evening. For example, “The mole has very small eyes and it always lives underground; it lives as long as it is in the dark, but when it comes into the light it dies immediately, because it becomes known—and so it is with lies.” 30 More than fifty of these fables were jotted in his notebooks during the seventeen years he spent in Milan.

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete by Leonardo Da Vinci (#3 in our series by Leonardo Da Vinci)

Not all dreams are psychic, and yet I believe that each one carries a personalized message that we need to hear. In one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, he asks, “Why does an eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination does while awake?

I wish to work miracles." - from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci

The first is to be curious, passionately curious. Take Leonardo. In his delight-filled notebooks we see his mind dancing across all fields of nature with a curiosity that is exuberant and playful. He asks and tries to answer hundreds of charmingly random questions: Why is the sky blue?

Leonardo da Vinci. His voluminous notebooks reveal his peculiar fascination with observation and invention. This is his Aristotelian side. But his famous etching of Vitruvian Man reveals his more mystical, Platonic side.

Leonardo’s notebooks are littered with analogies rendered in words and visual images. The swirling of water in the pool around a water wheel is juxtaposed with the swirling of the blood as it courses through the heart—not quite Harvey’s pump analogy, but almost. Leonardo compares the eddies in water with the movements of wind. He compares the processes by which light, heat, and odors are dispersed with distance—analogies that we now know to be inaccurate. But his analogies between waves in water, wind, and sounds carried on the air are still recognized as valid in modern physics. He compared the structure of the eye with that of the mind and also of an onion, portraying each as a visual analogy of the others.

As I have suggested earlier, this fascination likely came from a deep and correct intuition that the dynamics of vortices, which combine stability and change, embody an essential characteristic of all living forms.

the modern notion that everybody in medieval times believed that the Earth was flat is no more than a popular cliché. In actual fact, most scholars, from antiquity to the Renaissance, knew that the Earth is spherical.

Monks from the Grottaferra Abbey near Rome, charged with restoring one of the Vatican's obscure Leonardo da Vinci notebooks in the late zg6os, unwittingly revealed a blockbuster scribble that had been, according to Marinoni, locked away for several hundred years.

In Florence the sublime and terrible go hand in hand: Savonarola’s Bonfires of the Vanities and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks and Niccolò Macchiavelli’s The Prince, Dante’s Inferno and Boccaccio’s Decameron.

For Leonardo, the spiral form was the archetypal code for the ever-changing yet stable nature of living forms. He saw it in the growth patterns of plants and animals, in curling locks, in human movements and gestures, and above all in the swirling vortices of water and air. The movement of water is the grand unifying theme in Leonardo’s science of living forms. Water is the life-giving element flowing through the veins of the Earth and the blood vessels of the human body. It nourishes and sustains all living bodies. Its forms, like theirs, are fluid and always varying. It is a major source of power and for eons has shaped the surface of the living Earth, gradually turning arid rocks into fertile soil. With its infinite variety of form and movement—as rivers and tides, clouds and rain, cascades and currents, eddies and whirlpools—water flows through Leonardo’s art and interlinks the main fields of his science.

areas, and brilliantly, too. Leonardo is known as one of the greatest painters who ever lived, and many argue he was the greatest artist ever. However, his genius went far beyond the easel and his paintbrushes. His mind could conceive of almost anything, from a beautiful representation of Heaven to graphical illustrations of the human body in a time when there were no such things as CAT scans or x-rays. Leonardo’s lifetime was spent observing and doing so in many different venues. His notebooks were filled with examples of what it means to be human. He looked at life from numerous perspectives and recorded all he saw. From light and shade to perspective and visual perception, from botany and landscape to physical sciences and astronomy, from architecture and planning to sculpture and experiments, from inventing to philosophy, there was nothing that didn’t touch Leonardo da Vinci.

The most impressive documentation of Europe’s rising creative powers may be found in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). During their successive rediscoveries in modern times, these astonishing collections were mistakenly perceived as sketches of original inventions, products of an individual “Renaissance” genius. The misconception was due in part to the aesthetic quality of the drawings, and in part to a prevailing notion of the character of invention, an exaggeration of the contribution of the individual “inventor” and an underappreciation of the social nature of technical innovation.

Word of his midnight activities gets out. 'The pope has found out that I have skinned three corpses,' Leonardo writes in his notebook. He gets off easy. He's simply told: please stop skinning corpses.