More than 500 years ago, there was man who visualised how technology could change the world. He then set about to totally disrupt the world and did just that. He conceptualised flying machines, a type of armoured fighting vehicle, concentrated solar power, an adding machine, and the double hull, also outlining a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics.
Leonardo da Vinci, the “universal genius,” was a painter, architect, sculptor, military engineer –He knew that science without an understanding of human nature was simply play with no useful purpose or meaning. A famous artist and curious mind with an insatiable desire for knowledge who became a symbol of the Renaissance.
Born in Florence as an illegitimate child, Leonardo received his early education in a painter’s workshop; Andrea del Verrocchio was the one to introduce young da Vinci to the art world. But art alone couldn’t cover Leo’s unlimited curiosity of his surroundings, so he also studied the laws of science and nature.
A lot of Leonardo’s ideas and inventions are captured in notebooks and his paintings "The Last Supper" and "The Mona Lisa" prove his thinking and inventiveness were way ahead of the times he lived. His ideas influenced countless other brilliant minds. Showing us that technology for technology's sake will simply occupy time rather than unleash the best of humanity.
Leonardo da Vinci’s fame was indisputable during his lifetime and his legacy will remain powerful.
Want to be great at many things like Leonardo da Vinci? Then here are 40 quotes that will increase your thirst for knowledge.
1. "Learning never exhausts the mind, never fears, and never regrets."
2. "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."
3. "Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it."
4. "I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but they whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue their principles unto death."
5. "Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master."
6. "It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things."
7. "I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do."
8. "The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding."
9. "Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments."
10. "All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions."
11. "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."
12. "There are four powers: memory and intellect, desire and covetousness. The two first are mental and the others sensual. The three senses sight, hearing, and smell cannot well be prevented; touch and taste not at all."
13. "Just as food eaten without appetite is a tedious nourishment, so does study without zeal damage the memory by not assimilating what it absorbs."
14. "All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part."
15. "The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects."
16. "Life well spent is long."
17. "Common sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses."
18. "Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament and food of the mind of man."
19. "As a well - spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death."
20. "Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active."
21. "The greatest deception the men suffer is from their own opinions."
22. "Art is never finished only abandoned."
23. "There are three classes of people those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see."
24. "A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not."
25. "Nature is the source of all true acknowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity."
26. "Tears come from the heart and not from the brain."
27. "Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in."
28. "Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than with the imagination being awake?"
29. "Though I may not, like them, be able to quote other authors, I shall rely on that which is much greater and more worthy — on experience."
30. "One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself."
31. "The deeper the feeling, the greater the pain."
32. "He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year."
33. "In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time."
34. "Time abides long enough for those who make use of it."
35. "Learn how to see. Realise that everything connects to everything else."
36. "He who does not oppose evil, commands it to be done."
37. "Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory."
38. "Wisdom is the daughter of experience."
39. "One has no right to love or hate anything if one has not acquired a thorough knowledge of its nature."
40. "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."
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