“Men are in error when they lament the flight of time, accusing it of being too swift, and not perceiving that it is sufficient as it passes; but good memory, with which nature has endowed us, causes things long past to seem present.”
— Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Richter translation)
“Learning acquired in youth arrests the evil of old age; and if you understand that old age has wisdom for its food, you will so conduct yourself in youth that your old age will not lack for nourishment.”
— Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Richter translation)
“Life if well spent, is long.”
— Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Richter translation)
“I feel so strongly that the story of people is like the story of wheat, if one isn’t sown in the earth to germinate there, what does it matter, one is milled in order to become bread.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1889)
“The foxglove blossom, — a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom, — is a type of the life of this world.”
— John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Volume 2 (1853)
“[I]t seemed that like me, you suffered to see your youth going up in — smoke — but if it comes back and appears in what we do, there’s nothing lost, and the power to work is a second youth.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1888)
“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.”
— Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Richter translation)
“Truth was the only daughter of Time.”
— Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Richter translation)
“[S]hould one not have patience, not learn patience from nature, learn patience from seeing the wheat slowly come up, the growing of things — should one think oneself such a hugely dead thing that one believed one wouldn’t grow? Should one deliberately discourage one’s development?”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1883)
“[I]mperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent.”
— John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Volume 2 (1853)
“As a day well spent procures a happy sleep, so a life well employed procures a happy death.”
— Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Richter translation)
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