You do ill if you praise, but worse
if you censure, what you do not understand.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes
in the hope of pulling out an eel.
- Leonardo da Vinci
The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Iron rusts from disuse;
water loses its purity from stagnation...
even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.
- Leonardo da Vinci
The function of muscle is to pull and not to push,
except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Life is pretty simple:
You do some stuff.
Most fails. Some works.
You do more of what works.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.
- Leonardo da Vinci
It had long since come to my attention
that people of accomplishment
rarely sat back and let things happen to them.
They went out and happened to things.
- Leonardo da Vinci
The smallest feline is a masterpiece.
- Leonardo da Vinci
It's easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Learning never exhausts the mind.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Nature never breaks her own laws.
- Leonardo da Vinci
I love those who can smile in trouble,
who can gather strength from distress,
and grow brave by reflection.
- Leonardo da Vinci
He who is fixed to a star
does not change his mind.
- Leonardo da Vinci
There are three classes of people:
those who see,
those who see when they are shown,
those who do not see.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
- Leonardo da Vinci
For once you have tasted flight
you will walk the earth
with your eyes turned skywards,
for there you have been
and there you will long to return.
- Leonardo da Vinci
As every divided kingdom falls,
so every mind divided between
many studies confounds and saps itself.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams
than the imagination when awake?
- Leonardo da Vinci
Water is the driving force of all nature.
- Leonardo da Vinci
You can have no dominion greater or
less than that over yourself.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Experience does not err.
Only your judgments err by expecting from her
what is not in her power.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Men of lofty genius,
when they are doing the least work,
are most active.
- Leonardo da Vinci
All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.
- Leonardo da Vinci
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.
- Leonardo da Vinci
A well-spent day brings happy sleep.
- Leonardo da Vinci
While I thought that I was learning how to live,
I have been learning how to die.
- Leonardo da Vinci
The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
- Leonardo da Vinci
In rivers, the water that you touch
is the last of what has passed
and the first of that which comes;
so with present time.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.
- Leonardo da Vinci
As a well-spent day brings happy sleep,
so a life well spent brings happy death.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Common Sense is that which judges
the things given to it by other senses.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority
is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Make your work to be in keeping with your purpose.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Who sows virtue reaps honor.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Beyond a doubt, truth bears the same relation
to falsehood as light to darkness.
- Leonardo da Vinci
He who loves practice without theory
is like the sailor who boards ship
without a rudder and compass
and never knows where he may cast.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Life well spent is long.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Our life is made by the death of others.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience
it is necessary for us to do the opposite,
that is to commence with experience
and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Art is never finished, only abandoned.
- Leonardo da Vinci
He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.
- Leonardo da Vinci
The truth of things is the chief nutriment
of superior intellects.
- Leonardo da Vinci
The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Blinding ignorance does mislead us.
Oh Wretched mortals, open your eyes!
- Leonardo da Vinci
The poet ranks far below the painter
in the representation of visible things,
and far below the musician in that of invisible things.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Where the spirit does not work with the hand,
there is no art.
- Leonardo da Vinci
I love being married.
It's so great to find that one special person
you want to annoy for the rest of your life.
- Rita Rudner
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living;
the world owes you nothing; it was here first.
- Mark Twain
Yesterday is like a dung heap;
you can complain about the smell,
or you can use it to fertilize tomorrow's garden.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Be careful not to do your good deeds
when there's no one watching you.
- Tom Lehrer
However beautiful the strategy,
you should occasionally look at the results.
- Winston Churchill
If you do what you've always done,
you'll get what you always got.
- Mark Twain
If you are not one of us, you are one of them.
- the movie The Matrix (1999)
It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble.
It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
- Mark Twain (attributed)
I got a good mind to join a club
and beat you over the head with it.
- the Groucho Marx movie Duck Soup
There's no reason to become alarmed,
and we hope you'll enjoy the rest of your flight.
By the way, is there anyone on board who knows how to fly a plane?
- the movie Airplane!
No one can have a higher opinion of you than I have,
and I think you're a slimy, contemptible sewer rat!
- the movie The Great Mouse Detective
When I first saw you, I thought you were handsome.
Then, of course, you spoke.
- the movie As Good As It Gets (1997)
You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.
- Anonymous
I think you're the opposite of a paranoid.
I think you go around with the insane delusion that people like you.
- the Woody Allen movie Deconstructing Harry
You want to do mankind a real service?
Tell funnier jokes.
- the Woody Allen movie Stardust Memories (1980)
There are two things that are more difficult
than making an after-dinner speech:
climbing a wall which is leaning toward you
and kissing a girl who is leaning away from you.
- Winston Churchill
A friend is someone who will bail you out of jail.
A best friend is the one sitting next
to you saying "boy was that fun."
- The Maugles
In order to be happy with a man,
you must understand him a lot and love him a little.
To be happy with a woman, you must love her a lot
and not try to understand her at all.
- Helen Rowland
Give a man one rabbit, and he will eat for a day;
give a man two rabbits, and he will
feed his family and his neighbors
and return you 64,768 rabbits in change.
- Anonymous
Always remember the three magic words: You're right dear.
- Anonymous
A relationship, I think, is like a shark.
You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies.
And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.
- the Woody Allen movie Annie Hall (1977)
DON'T get officious.
You're not yourself when you're officious -
That is the curse of a government job.
- the movie Harold and Maude (1971)
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May the world be kind to you,
and may your own thoughts be gentle upon yourself.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
All materials & writings are copyright © Jonathan Lockwood Huie, except for quotes and other specifically identified material which belong to their respective copyright holders if applicable.