Edsverb
Play
The archive, at your fingertips
Try an author, a thought, or a phrase in “quotes”.↑ ↓ Navigate · Esc Close

0 words found

Explore all results ↗

The collection / 391 fragments

The living archive

Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

Leave empty for every voice. Browse all authors ↗

Reset

Culture labels and country attributions follow the source collections; earliest origins may be unknown.

391 results · Page 3 of 17Play this collection ▷
03c. 1486 AD
O mighty and once living instrument of creative nature, unable to avail thyself of thy great strength thou must needs abandon a life of tranquillity and obey the law which God and time gave to Nature the mother. Ah! how often the frighted shoals of dolphins and great tunny fish were seen fleeing before thy inhuman wrath; whilst thou, fulminating with swift beating of wings and twisted tail, raised in the sea a sudden storm with buffeting and sinking of ships and tossing of waves, filling the naked shores with terrified and distracted fishes.
Leonardo da Vinci / quote
↗
04c. 1486 AD
Since the eye is the window of the soul, the soul is always fearful of losing it, so much so that if a man is suddenly frightened by the motion or an object before him, he does not with his hands protect his heart, the source of all life; nor his head, where dwells the lord of the senses; nor the organs of hearing, smell and taste. But as soon as he feels fright it does not suffice him to close the lids of his eyes, keeping them shut with all his might, but he instantly turns in the opposite direction; and still not feeling secure he covers his eyes with one hand, stretching out the other to ward off the danger in the direction in which he suspects it to lie. Nature again has ordained that the eye of man shall close of itself, so that remaining during his sleep without protection it shall suffer no hurt.
Leonardo da Vinci / quote
↗
12c. 1486 AD
The body of anything which is fed is continually dying and being reborn, since nourishment cannot enter save where the past nourishment is exhausted; and if it is exhausted, it no longer has life, and if you do not furnish it with nourishment equal to that which has been before, you will impair the health of the organism, and if you deprive it of this nourishment, life will be altogether destroyed. But if you supply it with so much as can be consumed in a day, then as much life will be restored as was consumed, like the light of the candle which is furnished to it by the fuel provided by the moisture of the candle, and this light with most speedy succour restores beneath what is consumed above as it dies in dusky smoke; and this death is continuous, likewise the continuity of the smoke is equal to the continuity of the fuel; and in the same moment the light dies and is born again together with the movement of its fuel.
Leonardo da Vinci / quote
↗
17c. 1486 AD
Why did nature not ordain that one animal should not live by the death of the other? Nature, being inconstant and taking pleasure in continually creating and making lives and forms, because she knows that her earthly materials are thereby augmented, is more willing and swift to create than time is to destroy; and so she has ordained that many animals shall feed on each other. And as even thus her desire is not satisfied, she frequently sends forth certain poisonous and pestilential vapours upon the increasing multitude and congregation of animals, and especially upon men who increase to a great extent, because other animals do not feed on them; and since there is no cause, there would follow no effect. This earth, therefore, seeks to lose its [animal] life, desiring only continual reproduction, and as, by the logical demonstration you adduce, effects often resemble their causes, animals are the image of the life of the world.
Leonardo da Vinci / quote
↗
18c. 1486 AD
Now you see that the hope and the desire of returning home to one's former state is like the desire of the moth for the light, and the man who, with constant yearning and joyful expectancy, awaits the new spring and the new summer, and every new month and the new year, and thinks that what he longs for is ever too late in coming, and does not perceive that he is longing for his own destruction. But this desire is the quintessence, the spirit, of the elements, which, finding itself captive in the soul of the human body, desires always to return to its giver. And I would have you know that this same desire is the quintessence which is inseparable from nature, and that man is the model of the world. And such is the supreme folly of man that he labours so as to labour no more, and life flies from him while he forever hopes to enjoy the goods which he has acquired at the price of great labour.
Leonardo da Vinci / quote
↗
19c. 1486 AD
Nature has ordained for man the ministering muscles which exercise the sinews, and by means of which the limbs can be moved according to the will and desire of the brain, like to officers distributed by a ruler over many provinces and towns, who represent their ruler in these places, and obey his will. And this officer, who will in a single instance have most faithfully obeyed the orders he received from his master by word of mouth, will afterwards, in a similar way, of his own accord fulfil the wishes of his master. An example of this can be frequently seen in the fingers, which learn to perform on an instrument the things which the intellect commands, and the lesson once learnt they will perform it without the aid of the intellect. And do not the muscles which cause the legs to move perform their duty without man being conscious of it?
Leonardo da Vinci / quote
↗
21c. 1486 AD
It happens that our intellect is that which prompts the hand to create the features of figures in divine aspects until it finds satisfaction; and since the intellect is one of the tones of our soul, by means of the soul it composes the form of the body where it dwells, according to its volition. And when it has to reproduce a human body, it takes pleasure in repeating the body which it originally created; whence it follows that they who fall in love are prone to become enamoured of what resembles them.
Leonardo da Vinci / quote
↗
24c. 1486 AD
Although time is included among continuous quantities, being indivisible and immaterial it does not altogether fall into the scope of geometry,—by which it is divided into figures and bodies of infinite variety, which are seen to be continuous inasmuch as they are visible and material,—but it agrees only with its first principles, i.e. with the point and the line; the point in time may be compared to an instant, and the line to the length of a certain quantity of time. Just as the point is the beginning and end of a line, so is an instant the beginning and end of any given space of time; and just as a line is infinitely divisible, so can a given space of time be likewise divided, and as the divisions of the line are in proportion to each other, so likewise are the divisions of time.
Leonardo da Vinci / quote
↗