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“Above all, Leonardo’s relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it—to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.” (Leonardo da Vinci Quotes)
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Blink your eye and look at it again. That which you see was not there at first, and that which was there is no more.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“But I did learn from Leonardo how a desire to marvel about the world that we encounter each day can make each moment of our lives richer.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Each moment incorporates what came right before and what is coming right after.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“He also noted that the veins of humans narrow with age, but the springs and rivers of the earth continually enlarge their channels.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“He had an imagination so excitable that it flirted with the edges of fantasy, which is also something we can try to preserve in ourselves and indulge in our children.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“He never finished any of the works he began because, so sublime was his idea of art, he saw faults even in the things that to others seemed miracles.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“His lack of reverence for authority and his willingness to challenge received wisdom would lead him to craft an empirical approach for understanding nature that foreshadowed the scientific method developed more than a century later by Bacon and Galileo. His method was rooted in experiment, curiosity, and the ability to marvel at phenomena that the rest of us rarely pause to ponder after we’ve outgrown our wonder years.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“His scientific understanding of optics thus enhanced the three-dimensional illusion of the painting.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“If we want to be more like Leonardo, we have to be fearless about changing our minds based on new information.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Its leading thinkers embraced a Renaissance humanism that put its faith in the dignity of the individual and in the aspiration to find happiness on this earth through knowledge.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Leonardo at twenty-nine was more easily distracted by the future than he was focused on the present. He was a genius undisciplined by diligence.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Leonardo became known in Milan not only for his talents but also for his good looks, muscular build, and gentle personal style. “He was a man of outstanding beauty and infinite grace,” Vasari said of him. “He was striking and handsome, and his great presence brought comfort to the most troubled soul.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Leonardo da Vinci liked to boast that, because he was not formally educated, he had to learn from his own experiences instead.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Leonardo had almost no schooling and could barely read Latin or do long division. His genius was of the type we can understand, even take lessons from. It was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation. He had an imagination so excitable that it flirted with the edges of fantasy, which is also something we can try to preserve in ourselves and indulge in our children.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Leonardo had also been wrestling with the question of why the sky appears blue, and around that time he had correctly concluded that it had to do with the water vapor in the air. In the Saint Anne painting, he portrays the sky’s luminous and misty gradations of blue as no other painter had done. The recent cleaning of the painting fully reveals the magical realism, veiled in vapors, of his distant mountains and skyline.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Leonardo’s relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it—to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Look longer at the picture. It vibrates with Leonardo’s understanding that no moment is discrete, self-contained, frozen, delineated, just as no boundary in nature is sharply delineated. As with the river that Leonardo described, each moment is part of what just passed and what is about to come. This is one of the essences of Leonardo’s art: from the Adoration of the Magi to Lady with an Ermine to The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, each moment is not distinct but instead contains connections to a narrative.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of the desire for wisdom, which is the sustenance and truly dependable wealth of the mind.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“One mark of a great mind is the willingness to change it. We can see that in Leonardo. As he wrestled with his earth and water studies during the early 1500s, he ran into evidence that caused him to revise his belief in the microcosm-macrocosm analogy. It was Leonardo at his best, and we have the great fortune of being able to watch that evolution as he wrote the Codex Leicester. There he engaged in a dialogue between theories and experience, and when they conflicted he was receptive to trying a new theory. That willingness to surrender preconceptions was key to his creativity.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“One must apply the greatest artistry in three things,” Alberti wrote, “walking in the city, riding a horse, and speaking, for in each of these one must try to please everyone.” Leonardo mastered all three.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“One purpose of these notebooks was to record interesting scenes, especially those involving people and emotions. “As you go about town,” he wrote in one of them, “constantly observe, note, and consider the circumstances and behavior of men as they talk and quarrel, or laugh, or come to blows. “ For that purpose, he kept a small notebook hanging from his belt.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“That goes a step too far, I think. Leonardo did not invent the scientific method, nor did Aristotle or Alhazen or Galileo or any Bacon. But his uncanny abilities to engage in the dialogue between experience and theory made him a prime example of how acute observations, fanatic curiosity, experimental testing, a willingness to question dogma, and the ability to discern patterns across disciplines can lead to great leaps in human understanding.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“The glory of being an artist, he realized, was that reality should inform but not constrain.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Those who are in love with practice without theoretical knowledge are like the sailor who goes onto a ship without rudder or compass and who never can be certain whither he is going,” he wrote in 1510. “Practice must always be founded on sound theory.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Vision without execution is hallucination… Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo da Vinci knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history’s consummate innovator.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
