Leonardo da Vinci

(1452-1519) Leonardo da Vinci was a Florentine artist, one of the great masters of the High Renaissance, who was also celebrated as a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and scientist. His profound love of knowledge and research was the keynote of both his artistic and scientific endeavors. His innovations in the field of painting influenced the course of Italian art for more than a century after his death, and his scientific studies particularly in the fields of anatomy, optics, and hydraulics anticipated many of the developments of modern science.

"The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions." "Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity, and in cold weather becomes frozen, even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind."

 "Just as iron rusts from disuse, even so does inaction spoil the intellect."

"Just as eating contrary to the inclination is injurious to the health, so study without desire sports the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in."

"Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness."

"...the truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects."

"Nature is full of infinite causes that have never occurred in experience."

"He who does not punish evil commands it to be done."

"Where there is shouting there is no true knowledge."

"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 be powerless to vex your mind."

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

"The part always has a tendency to reunite with its whole in order to escape from its imperfection."

"It's easier to resist at the beginning than at the end."

"Wisdom is the daughter of experience."

"You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself."

"Learning acquired in youth arrests the evil of old age; and if you understand that old age has wisdom for its food, you will so conduct yourself in youth that your old age will not lack for nourishment."

"Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it."