A biography for Leonardo da Vincihasn’t been written yet.
“Truth at last cannot be hidden. Dissimulation is of no avail. Dissimulation is to no purpose before so great a judge. Falsehood puts on a mask. Nothing is hidden under the sun.”
“The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.”
“Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.”
“Just as a well-filled day brings blessed sleep, so a well-employed life brings a blessed death”
“Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation... even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.”
“The natural desire of good men is knowledge.”
“For, verily, great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it, you will be able to love it only little or not at all.”
“I abhor the supreme folly of those who blame the disciples of nature in defiance of those masters who were themselves her pupils”
“Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”
“Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.”
“Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.”
“Learning never exhausts the mind.”
“I have wasted my hours.”
“One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.”
“Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.”
“Just as courage is the danger of life, so is fear its safeguard.”
“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.”
“How many emperors and how many princes have lived and died and no record of them remains, and they only sought to gain dominions and riches in order that their fame might be ever-lasting.”
“Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.”
“Good men by nature, wish to know. I know that many will call this useless work... men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of that of wisdom, which is the food and only true riches of the mind.”