Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame initially rested on his achievements as a painter, he has also become known for his notebooks, in which he made drawings and notes on a variety of subjects, including anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and palaeontology. Leonardo is widely regarded as a genius who epitomised the Renaissance humanist ideal, and his collective works contributed to the development of European art to an extent rivalled only by that of his younger contemporary Michelangelo.

Quotes

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.
Those who become enamored of practices without science are like sailors who go aboard ship without a rudder and compass, for they are never certain where they will land.
Blinding ignorance does mislead us.
O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!
Experience does not ever err. It is only your judgment that errs in promising itself results which are not caused by your experiments.
It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
Supreme happiness will be the greatest cause of misery, and the perfection of wisdom the occassion of folly.
Once you have flown, your eyes will ever gaze skyward. For once you have been there ... There you will go again!
Inequality is the cause of all local movements.
Nature is full of infinite causes that have never occurred in experience.
Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.

Patience
As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.

Death
Marriage: putting one's hand into a bag of snakes on the chance of drawing out an eel.
Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but memory.
Intellectual passion dries out sensuality.
When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.
Anyone who invokes authors in discussion is not using his intelligence but his memory.

Talking
I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.

Animals
Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

Thinking, Work
All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions.

Knowledge