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The collection / 734 fragments

Life.

Explore passages mentioning life, living. Topic suggestions use transparent word matching, not scholarly classification. Editorial meanings and lexical matches are discovery aids, not independent authentication of a quotation.

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734 results · Page 27 of 31Play this collection ▷
02c. 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
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03c. 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
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04c. 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
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06c. 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
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07c. 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
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08c. 1486 AD
And thou, O man, who wilt gaze in this work of mine on the marvellous works of nature, if thou thinkest it would be an act of wickedness to destroy it, think how much more wicked it is to take the life of a man; and if this his structure appears to thee a miraculous work of art, remember that it is nothing in comparison with the soul which inhabits this structure; for verily, whatever it may be, it is divine. Let it, then, dwell in His work and at His good will, and let not thy rage or malice destroy so great a thing as life, for he who does not value it does not deserve it.
Leonardo da Vinci / quote
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09c. 1486 AD
How by the aid of a machine many may remain for some time under water. And how and why I do not describe my method of remaining under water and of living long without food; and I do not publish nor divulge these things by reason of the evil nature of man, who would use them for assassinations at the bottom of the sea and to destroy and sink ships, together with the men on board of them; and notwithstanding I will teach other things which are not dangerous....
Leonardo da Vinci / quote
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18c. 1486 AD
The eye, which reflects the beauty of the universe to those who see, is so excellent a thing that he who consents to its loss deprives himself of the spectacle of the works of nature; and it is owing to this spectacle, effected by means of the eye, which enables the soul to behold the various objects of nature, that the soul is content to remain in the prison of the body; but he who loses his eyesight leaves the soul in a dark prison, where all hope of once more beholding the sun, the light of the whole world, is lost.... And how many are they who feel great hatred for the darkness of night, although it is brief. Oh! what would they do were they constrained to abide in this darkness during the whole of their life? Certainly there is no one who would not rather lose his hearing or his sense of smell than his eyesight, and the loss of hearing includes the loss of all sciences which find expression in words; and this loss a man would incur solely so as not to be deprived of the sight of the beauty of the world which consists in the surfaces of bodies artificial as well as natural, which are reflected in the human eye.
Leonardo da Vinci / quote
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19c. 1486 AD
Because writers have had no knowledge of the science of painting, they have not been able to describe its gradations and parts, and since painting itself does not reveal itself nor its artistic work in words, it has remained, owing to ignorance, behind the sciences mentioned above, but it has thereby lost nothing of its divinity. And truly it is not without reason that men have failed to honour it, because it does honour to itself without the aid of the speech of others, just as do the excellent works of nature. And if the painters have not described the art of painting, and reduced it to a science, the fault must not be imputed to painting and it is no less noble on that account, since few painters profess a knowledge of letters, as their life would not be long enough for them to acquire such knowledge. Therefore we ask, Is the virtue of herbs, stones and plants non-existent because men have been ignorant of it? Certainly not; but we will say that these herbs remained noble in themselves without the aid of human tongues or letters.
Leonardo da Vinci / quote
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20c. 1486 AD
Music should be given no other name than the sister of painting, inasmuch as it is subject to the hearing,—a sense inferior to the eye,—and it produces harmony by the unison of its proportioned parts, which are brought into operation at the same moment and are constrained to come to life and die in one or more harmonic times; and time is, as it were, the circumference of the parts which constitute the harmony, in the same way as the outline constitutes the circumference of limbs whence human beauty emanates. But painting excels and lords over music because it does not die as soon as it is born, as occurs with music, the less fortunate; on the contrary, it continues to exist and reveals itself to be what it is, a single surface. O marvellous science, thou givest lasting life to the perished beauty of mortals, which are thus made more enduring than the works of nature, for these undergo forever the changes of time, and time leads them to inevitable old age! And this science is to divine nature as its works are to the works of nature, and on this account it is worshipped.
Leonardo da Vinci / quote
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21c. 1486 AD
Radically wrong is the procedure of some masters who are in the habit of repeating the same themes in the same episodes, and whose types of beauty are likewise the same, for in nature they are never repeated, so that if all the beauties of equal excellence were to come to life again they would compose a larger population than that now existing in our century, and since in the present century no one person is precisely similar to another, so would it be among the beauties mentioned above.
Leonardo da Vinci / quote
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24c. 1486 AD
I shall reserve the reasons of its size and power for later. But I greatly marvel that Socrates should have depreciated such a body, and that he should have said that it resembled an incandescent stone; and he who opposed him as regards this error acted rightly. But I wish I had words to blame those who seek to exalt the worship of men more than that of the sun, since in the universe there is no body of greater magnitude and power to be seen than the sun. And its light illumines all the celestial bodies which are distributed throughout the universe; and the vital spark descends from it, because the heat which is in living beings comes from the soul, and there is no other centre of heat and light in the universe, as will be shown later; and it is certain that those who have elected to worship men as gods—as Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, &c.—have fallen into a profound error, since even if a man were as great as our earth, he would have the appearance of a little star, which appears like a dot in the universe; and moreover these men are mortal, and decay and corrupt in their sepulchres.
Leonardo da Vinci / quote
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