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A good memory, which nature has endowed us with, causes things long past to seem present.

Leonardo da Vinci

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Leonardo da Vinci
Age: 67 †
Born: 1452
Born: April 15
Died: 1519
Died: May 2
Anatomist
Architect
Astronomer
Botanist
Caricaturist
Chemist
Civil Engineer
Composer
Diplomat
Engineer
Inventor
Mathematician
Musician
Past
Seems
Endowed
Long
Memory
Good
Seem
Things
Memories
Present
Causes
Nature

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Experience, the interpreter between creative nature and the human race, teaches the action of nature among mortals: how under the constraint of necessity she cannot act otherwise than as reason, who steers her helm, teaches her to act.
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O admirable necessity! O powerful action! What mind can penetrate your nature? What language can express this marvel? None, to be sure. This is where human discourse turns toward the contemplation of the divine.
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Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works.
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Why are the bones of great fishes, and oysters and corals and various other shells and sea-snails, found on the high tops of mountains that border the sea, in the same way in which they are found in the depths of the sea?
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Just as iron rusts from disuse, and stagnant water putrefies, or when cold turns to ice, so our intellect wastes unless it is kept in use.
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And you who wish to represent by words the form of man and all the aspects of his membrification, relinquish that idea. For the more minutely you describe the more you will confine the mind of the reader, and the more you will keep him from the knowledge of the thing described. And so it is necessary to draw and to describe.
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The human being, creature of eyes, needs the image.
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No one should ever imitate the style of another because, with regard to art, he will be called a nephew and not a child of nature.
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The eye is the window of the human body through which it feels its way and enjoys the beauty of the world.
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An infinite number of men will sell publicly and unhindered things of the very highest price, without leave from the Master of it while it never was theirs nor in their power and human justice will not prevent it.
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Of several bodies, all equally large and equally distant, that which is most brightly illuminated will appear to the eye nearest and largest.
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Shadows which you see with difficulty, and whose boundaries you cannot define... these you should not represent as finished or sharply defined, for the result would be that your work would seem wooden.
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Perspective is the rein and rudder of painting.
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Study the science of art and the art of science.
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The painter who draws by practise and judgment of the eye without the use of reason is like the mirror which reproduces within itself all the objects which are set opposite to it without knowledge of the same.
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The boundaries of bodies are the least of all things.
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Thou, O God, dost sell us all good things at the price of labor.
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Affective gestures pointing to things near either in time or space should be made with the hand not very far from the body of the person pointing and if these things are distant, the hand of the painter should be more extended and the face turned toward the person to whom he is addressing the demonstration.
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People of higher talent work, even if they seem to do nothing
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Instrumental or mechanical science is the noblest and above all others, the most useful.
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