30 Leonardo da Vinci Quotes, and Which Ones Are Really His

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30 Leonardo da Vinci Quotes, and Which Ones Are Really His

Many of the most shared Leonardo da Vinci quotes were never written by him. Of the thirty sayings that circulate together in lists like this one, only around a dozen can be traced to his notebooks or his writings on painting, and several of those are loose modern rewordings. Others belong to Thomas Paine, Paul Valéry, Niccolò Machiavelli, an American aviator, a Russian novelist and a 1960s TV scriptwriter.

Below we sort the sayings into three groups: lines that really come from Leonardo, lines that are credited to him but have no known source, and lines that belong to someone else. First, a quick look at who he was and where his genuine words survive.

Who Leonardo da Vinci was

Leonardo was born on 15 April 1452 near the Tuscan town of Vinci, the son of a notary, Ser Piero, and a young woman named Caterina. He trained in Florence in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, then worked for the Sforza court in Milan, for patrons in Florence and Rome, and finally for King Francis I of France. He died at Amboise on 2 May 1519.

He is remembered first as a painter, even though fewer than 25 major works are attributed to him. Two of them, the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, are among the most famous images ever made. Yet he spent at least as much energy on engineering, anatomy, optics, the flow of water, geology and the flight of birds. He designed machines for flying and for war, studied the heart and the growth of a foetus, and mapped rivers for military engineers. Because he did not publish, most of this work had little influence on the science of his own century.

Art historians often describe him as the model of the “Renaissance man”. A useful correction is that his genius was practical as much as mystical. He tested ideas by looking hard, drawing and experimenting, and he trusted what he saw over what he read.

Are You Interested In Art Then, You Will Be Impressed By Reading These 30 Quotes By Leonardo Da Vinci

The Mona Lisa, painted in oil on a poplar panel from about 1503 and reworked for years afterwards, hangs in the Louvre in Paris. The sitter is generally identified as Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo. Leonardo kept the panel with him until his death, which helps explain why it came to France.

Where his real words survive

Leonardo filled thousands of notebook pages, written right to left in mirror script, with sketches, calculations, shopping lists and short reflections. Thousands of pages survive, scattered across collections such as the Codex Atlanticus in Milan, the Royal Collection at Windsor and the Codex Leicester owned by Bill Gates. After his death his pupil and heir Francesco Melzi gathered his notes on art into what became the Treatise on Painting, first printed in 1651.

Most English readers meet these texts through Jean Paul Richter’s edition of 1883 or Edward MacCurdy’s translations of the early twentieth century. Any honest Leonardo quote should be traceable to one of those, or to a modern scholarly edition. If a famous line appears only on posters and quote sites, that is a warning sign.

Sayings that do come from Leonardo

These lines can be traced to his notebooks or the Treatise on Painting, although popular versions often smooth or shorten them.

  • Painting and poetry (No. 1). The popular version, which contrasts “seen” with “felt”, garbles the original. In the Treatise Leonardo argues that painting is a poetry that is seen but not heard, and poetry a painting that is heard but not seen. His point was a rivalry between the arts, with painting winning because sight is the nobler sense.
  • Study without desire (No. 5). A shortened form of a notebook passage comparing study without enthusiasm to eating without appetite: neither is absorbed or remembered.
  • A day and a life well spent (No. 14). Leonardo compares a well-used day, which brings good sleep, with a well-used life, which brings a peaceful death. It appears in Richter’s translation.
  • Being alone (No. 17). Advice to young painters from the Treatise: alone you belong entirely to yourself, and each companion takes a share of your attention. He meant that study needs solitude, not that friendship is bad.
  • Self-deception (No. 18). In the notebooks he says that people are most deceived by their own opinions, a theme he returns to when criticising scholars who trusted books over observation.
  • Feeling and pain (No. 22). The Italian original says, roughly, that where there is the most feeling there is the most suffering. The list’s version is a fair paraphrase.
  • Resisting early (No. 23). A short moral note found among his sayings: it is easier to resist at the start than at the end.
  • Wanting what you can (No. 24). One of his neatest lines: “Since you cannot do what you want, want what you can.” It is a Stoic idea he expressed in a single rhyme in Italian.
  • Learning to die (No. 25). From the Codex Atlanticus, in Richter’s wording: “While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.”

Lines credited to him without a known source

The following sayings are often attributed to Leonardo and sound like him, but we have not found them in the notebooks or the Treatise in the form they usually take. Treat them as “attributed” rather than proven.

  • The advice to start a canvas with a wash of black (No. 2). Leonardo did write about painting shadows first and about darkness as the ground of light, but the neat formula looks modern.
  • The painter holding the universe in his mind and hands (No. 7), and the artist seeing what others only glimpse (No. 27). Both echo his ideas about the painter as a master of all visible things, without matching his wording.
  • Silence strengthening authority (No. 8), mastery of oneself (No. 10), love depending on understanding (No. 11) and the noblest pleasure being understanding (No. 12). Each has a loose parallel in his writing on love, knowledge and self-control; none has a clear citation in the popular form.
  • The idea that all knowledge is possible (No. 19), that spirit and hand must work together (No. 26), that time lasts for those who use it (No. 28) and that life without love is no life (No. 29).
  • The two best-known quotes of all: the claim that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication (No. 4) and the advice to realise that everything connects (No. 30). Quote Investigator found no solid source for the first, and lists Leonardo among about ten people credited with the second.

Lines that belong to someone else

  • Tasting flight (No. 3) was written by the American television writer John H. Secondari for the ABC documentary I, Leonardo da Vinci (1965), part of the series The Saga of Western Man, as Air Facts Journal has shown. Leonardo did dream of flight, but not in those words.
  • People who happen to things (No. 6) is credited to the American aviator Elinor Smith (1911–2010), not to Leonardo.
  • Smiling in trouble (Nos. 9 and 15) is the same passage twice. It comes from Thomas Paine’s pamphlet The American Crisis (December 1776), which also opens with the line about “times that try men’s souls”.
  • Giving up meat (No. 13) comes from Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s 1900 novel The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, where it is spoken by the fictional Leonardo. Contemporaries did report that he was kind to animals and may have avoided meat, but the speech is invented.
  • Art never finished (No. 16) adapts the French poet Paul Valéry, who wrote in 1933 that a work is never finished, only abandoned.
  • Learning never exhausting the mind (No. 20) appears to be a modern paraphrase with no Renaissance source.
  • Three kinds of people (No. 21) adapts Machiavelli’s three classes of intellect in chapter XXII of The Prince: those who understand by themselves, those who understand when shown, and those who understand neither way.

How to check a Leonardo quote yourself

Start with the free text of Richter’s Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci on Project Gutenberg and search for a distinctive word from the quote. If nothing turns up, try Wikiquote’s Leonardo page, which separates sourced lines from disputed and misattributed ones, and Quote Investigator, which traces the earliest printed appearance of popular sayings.

Watch for three common red flags. Modern business vocabulary such as “sophistication” or “accomplishment” in a supposedly fifteenth-century sentence is one. A quote that only appears after the 1960s is another. The third is a line that sounds like a poster slogan rather than a working note; Leonardo wrote mostly in practical, specific terms about light, water, muscles and machines.

The genuine notebooks are worth the effort. They show a mind that recorded what it saw before deciding what it meant, and that habit is a better tribute to him than any invented one-liner. To see that habit in action, look at Leonardo’s Anatomical Drawings: Learning Through Art or his letter offering his skills to the Duke of Milan.

Sources: The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, tr. Jean Paul Richter (Project Gutenberg); Wikiquote: Leonardo da Vinci; Wikipedia: Leonardo da Vinci; Wikipedia: Mona Lisa; Air Facts Journal on the flight quote; Quote Investigator; Thomas Paine, The American Crisis; WIST on Paul Valéry; Merezhkovsky, The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci; Machiavelli, The Prince (Project Gutenberg); Wikipedia: Elinor Smith.

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