Leonardo da Vinci Quotes

The eye, the window of the soul, is the chief means whereby the understanding can most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of Nature; and the ear is second.

I think seeing happens partly through the eyes, but not entirely.

It is so wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it does not occur to them that is just as wonderful that he should see with them; and that is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual.

The eye is the window of the human body through which it feels its way and enjoys the beauty of the world.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

The eye of a human being is a microscope, which makes the world seem bigger than it really is.

A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

Optics, developing in us through study, teach us to see.

Men see through different optics.

Beauty, my dear Sir, is not so much a quality of the object beheld, as an effect in him who beholds it. If our sight were longer or shorter, or if our constitution were different, what now appears beautiful to us would seem misshapen, and what we now think misshapen we should regard as beautiful. The most beautiful hand seen through the microscope will appear horrible. Some things are beautiful at a distance, but ugly near;

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

Color is just in a small area of our vision, and the rest we add with the mind.

I see through my eyes; the camera is just a machine to record it for me.

You wish to see; listen. Hearing is a step toward Vision.

Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.

The most pleasurable thing in the world, for me, is to see something and then translate how I see it.

I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

Seeing is in some respect an art, which must be learnt.

Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.

The eye doesn't see any shapes, it sees only what is differentiated through light and dark or through colors.

The idea part is simple but the visual perception is complex.

I'm such a jerk; it had never occurred to me that when we look at a photo from the front, the eyes reproduce exactly the position and the vision of the lens; it's these things that are taken for granted and it never occurs to anyone to think about them.

To see is to think, and to think is to see.