Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, more commonly Leonardo da Vinci or simply Leonardoˈvintʃi] ; 15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519), was an Italian polymath whose areas of interest included invention, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history, and cartography. He has been variously called the father of paleontology, ichnology, and architecture, and is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time. Sometimes credited with the inventions of the parachute, helicopter and tank,...
NationalityItalian
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth15 April 1452
CityVinci, Italy
CountryItaly
Make your faces so that they do not all have the same expression, as one sees with most painters, but give them different expression, according to age, complexion, and good or bad character.
You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself...the height of a man's success is gauged by his self-mastery; the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment. ...And this law is the expression of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others.
There shall be wings! If the accomplishment be not for me, 'tis for some other.
Obstacles cannot crush me; every obstacle yields to stern resolve.
Nothing can be love or hated unless it is first known.
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.
Experience does not ever err; it is only your judgment that errs in promising itself results which are not caused by your experiments
No member needs so great a number of muscles as the tongue; this exceeds all the rest in the number of its movements
The eye sees a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination awake.
Time stays long enough for those who use it.
You do ill to praise, but worse to censure, what you do not understand
Thou, O God, dost sell us all good things at the price of labor
The painter who is familiar with the nature of the sinews, muscles, and tendons, will know very well, in giving movement to a limb, how many and which sinews cause it; and which muscle, by swelling, causes the contraction of that sinew; and which sinews, expanded into the thinnest cartilage, surround and support the said muscle.
The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.