Leonardo da Vinci

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Learning never exhausts the mind.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them.

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.

He who does not value life does not deserve it.

Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.

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

Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.

Human subtlety...will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

Oysters open completely when the moon is full; and when the crab sees one it throws a piece of stone or seaweed into it and the oyster cannot close again so that it serves the crab for meat. Such is the fate of him who opens his mouth too much and thereby puts himself at the mercy of the listener.

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.

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

O neglectful Nature, wherefore art thou thus partial, becoming to some of thy children a tender and benignant mother, to others a most cruel and ruthless stepmother? I see thy children given into slavery to others without ever receiving any benefit, and in lieu of any reward for the services they have done for them they are repaid by the severest punishments.

That is not riches, which may be lost; virtue is our true good and the true reward of its possessor. That cannot be lost; that never deserts us, but when life leaves us. As to property and external riches, hold them with trembling; they often leave their possessor in contempt, and mocked at for having lost them.