Leonardo da Vinci Causes Quotations

Lust is the cause of generation.

The motive power is the cause of all life.

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

Supreme happiness will be the greatest cause of misery, and the perfection of wisdom the occassion of folly.

Given the cause nature produces the effect in the briefest manner that it can employ.

Good culture is born of a good disposition; and since the cause is more to be praised than the effect, I will rather praise a good disposition without culture, than good culture without the disposition.

Inequality is the cause of all local movements.

All objects transmit their image to the eye in pyramids and the nearer to the eye these pyramids are intersected the smaller will the image appear of the objects which cause them.

O painter skilled in anatomy, beware lest the undue prominence of the bones, sinews and muscles cause you to become a wooden painter from the desire to make your nude figures reveal all.

The painter who is familiar with the nature of the sinews, muscles, and tendons, will know very well, in giving movement to a limb, how many and which sinews cause it; and which muscle, by swelling, causes the contraction of that sinew; and which sinews, expanded into the thinnest cartilage, surround and support the said muscle.

Nature is full of infinite causes that have never occurred in experience.

There is no result in nature without a cause; understand the cause and you will have no need of the experiment.