“All sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of Experience, the mother of all Knowledge.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, quote from Leonardo's Notebooks
“I awoke only to find that the rest of the world was still asleep.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, quote from Leonardo's Notebooks
“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, quote from Leonardo's Notebooks
“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.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, quote from Leonardo's Notebooks
“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.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, quote from Leonardo's Notebooks
“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.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, quote from Leonardo's Notebooks
“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.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, quote from Leonardo's Notebooks
“Like a kingdom divided, which rushes to its doom, the mind that engages in subjects of too great variety becomes confused and weakened.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, quote from Leonardo's Notebooks
“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.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, quote from Leonardo's Notebooks
“It is as great an error to speak well of a worthless man as to speak ill of a good man.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, quote from Leonardo's Notebooks
“For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, quote from Leonardo's Notebooks
“Nitre, vitriol, cinnabar, alum, salt ammoniac, sublimated mercury, rock salt, alcali salt, common salt, rock alum, alum schist, arsenic, sublimate, realgar, tartar, orpiment, verdegris.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, quote from Leonardo's Notebooks
“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.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, quote from Leonardo's Notebooks
“No counsel is more trustworthy than that which is given upon ships that are in peril.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, quote from Leonardo's Notebooks
“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.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, quote from Leonardo's Notebooks
“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?”
― Leonardo da Vinci, quote from Leonardo's Notebooks
Leonardo da Vinci
Born place: in Vinci, Republic of Florence, Italy
Born date March 1, 1452
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“People say actions speak louder than words, but sometimes it’s the words that hurt the most. Actions are easy to ignore, but words hit you right where it hurts.”
― quote from You’re the Password to My Life
“Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.”
― Herman Melville, quote from Moby Dick: or, the White Whale
“something which is absurd or logically contradictory, but which appears at first glance to be the result of sound reasoning.”
― E.T. Jaynes, quote from Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
“Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Grand Inquisitor
“When thinking about risk from transport, you can think directly in terms of minutes of life lost per hour of travel. Each time you travel, you face a slight risk of getting into a fatal accident, but the chance of getting into a fatal accident varies dramatically depending on the mode of transport. For example, the risk of a fatal car crash while driving for an hour is about one in ten million (so 0.1 micromorts). For a twenty-year-old, that’s a one-in-ten-million chance of losing sixty years. The expected life lost from driving for one hour is therefore three minutes. Looking at expected minutes lost shows just how great a discrepancy there is between risks from different sorts of transport. Whereas an hour on a train costs you only twenty expected seconds of life, an hour on a motorbike costs you an expected three hours and forty-five minutes. In addition to giving us a way to compare the risks of different activities, the concept of expected value helps us choose which risks are worth taking. Would you be willing to spend an hour on a motorbike if it was perfectly safe but caused you to be unconscious later for three hours and forty-five minutes? If your answer is no, but you’re otherwise happy to ride motorbikes in your day-to-day life, you’re probably not fully appreciating the risk of death.”
― William MacAskill, quote from Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
North! or Be Eaten
The Iliad of Homer
Moby Dick: or, the W...
Probability Theory:...
The Grand InquisitorBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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