The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Volume 1
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Volume 1
Translated by Jean Paul Richter
These are the private jottings of the most restless mind in human history, a man who saw no boundary between art and science, between the curve of a hip bone and the curve of a river.Compiled from notebooks written in mirrored script during the late 15th and early 16th centuries, this volume gathers Leonardo's fragmentary thoughts on everything from the mechanics of flight to the proper angle of light falling on a human face. Here are his observations on perspective and the eye, his studies of water and wind, his sketches of machines that would not be built for centuries. The writing is not polished or systematic; it is the working mind of a genius in real time, racing from one wonder to the next. What emerges is not a textbook but a window into how one man perceived the universe as a continuous web of connections, where painting and physics, anatomy and architecture, were all expressions of the same hunger to understand. For anyone who has ever wondered how a human being could paint the Mona Lisa and also design a flying machine, these pages offer something rare: the voice of the thing itself.
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“All sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of Experience, the mother of all Knowledge.””
— da Vinci Leonardo
“I awoke only to find that the rest of the world was still asleep.””
— da Vinci Leonardo
“Man has much power of discourse which for the most part is vain and false; animals have but little, but it is useful and true, and a small truth is better than a great lie.””
— da Vinci Leonardo
“Men fight wars and destroy everything around them. The earth should open and swallow them up. He who does not value life does not deserve it. Never destroy another life through rage, or through malice.””
— da Vinci Leonardo
“The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present.Life, if well spent, is long.””
— da Vinci Leonardo
“The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use. But the bee gathers its materials from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.””
— da Vinci Leonardo
“If the painter wishes to see beauties that charm him, it lies in his power to create them, and if he wishes to see monstrosities that are frightful, ridiculous, or truly pitiable, he is lord and God thereof.””
— da Vinci Leonardo
“For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.””
— da Vinci Leonardo
“It is as great an error to speak well of a worthless man as to speak ill of a good man.””
— da Vinci Leonardo
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Leonardo, da Vinci. The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Volume 1. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-notebooks-of-leonardo-da-vinci-volume-1-add3b96d-29d2-4672-bbd5-1b8b04825ea0.Leonardo, D. V. (n.d.). The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Volume 1. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-notebooks-of-leonardo-da-vinci-volume-1-add3b96d-29d2-4672-bbd5-1b8b04825ea0Leonardo, da Vinci. The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Volume 1. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-notebooks-of-leonardo-da-vinci-volume-1-add3b96d-29d2-4672-bbd5-1b8b04825ea0.
