Leonardo da Vinci Quotes

A mountain still in the distance can appear as a molehill.

Maybe because she's smaller than me she might look taller.

Just as things in a picture, when viewed from a distance, appear to be all in one and the same condition and alike.

You say I'm small? I certainly can relate, although it is a matter of perspective. The distance is deceptive, my friend, you standtoo low.

A mountain seen in the haze of distance must nevertheless look a solid heavy mountain.

When I see a head from a great distance, it ceases to be a sphere and becomes an extreme confusion falling down into the abyss.

With the most powerful binoculars, I cannot see Alaska.

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

It's pretty far, but it doesn't seem like it.

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;

"I see nobody on the road," said Alice. "I only wish I had such eyes," the King remarked in a fretful tone. "To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light."

It's hard to look at things that are too close.

What looks large from a distance, close up ain’t never that big.

At a distance this fine oak seems to be of ordinary size. But if I place myself under its branches, the impression changes completely: I see it as big, and even terrifying in its bigness.

There are three aspects to perspective. The first has to do with how the size of objects seems to diminish according to distance: the second, the manner in which colors change the farther away they are from the eye; the third defines how objects ought to be finished less carefully the farther away they are.

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.

If you stand too close to a painting - all you see are patches of color, if you stand too far back, you can't see any of the detail.

The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could see.

Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.

There are forms that can only be seen when you are near a painting, others only appear when you are far away.

This part of optics, when well understood, shows us how we may make things a very long distance off appear as if placed very close, and large near things appear very small, and how we may make small things placed at a distance appear any size we want, so that it may be possible for us to read the smallest letters at incredible distances, or to count sand, or seed, or any sort or minute objects.

It's not too far; it just seems like it is.

Things seem more when you’re little. They seem bigger, and distances seem farther.

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.

The further you are from a problem, the smaller it gets.