Leonardo da Vinci Quotes

Natural objects, for example, must be experienced before any theorizing about them can occur.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.

I have no use for knowledge that has not been preceded by a sensation

There is no perfect knowledge which can be entitled ours, that is innate; none but what has been obtained from experience, or derived in some way from our senses.

You can't teach anyone. You can't tell anyone. That's the thing you have to sit down and experience in order for it to mean anything. You can't intellectualize it. It's like why movies are cool. It's a combination of pictures and design and acting and music can create an experience that is outside of the experience that you can actually have in reality, which gets to my motion picture philosophy. People are like, 'aren't you trying to make the movies as real as you can?'

The process may seem strange and yet it is very true. I did not so much gain the knowledge of things by the words, as words by the experience I had of things.

I only believe in what I see and hear with my own eyes and ears.

You have to see a building to comprehend it. Photographs cannot convey the experience, nor film.

For research, I like to go to the location of the places in the novels. The first thing that I do is involve my senses: I notice the smells; I open the trash cans and look at what people have thrown away.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

I was brought up in a way that was based purely on the senses. Everything in my upbringing was a reaction to growing up on an organic farm or to the emotions of animal cruelty, as well as the visuals of my mum's and my father's art - he was also an art collector.

I'm somebody who has to physically experience an environment in order to know it as well as I would like to know it. I recognize this is impressionistic, not scientific. People say, 'You sound like Walt Whitman.' Well, I'll take that comparison.

You don't really get the full grasp of something until you see it for yourself.

I think the best research is people you meet and things that they say, rather than second hand accounts of something. I think when you meet someone and talk to them, then you get the real thing and that's what you can use. That's the material you can actually put on the page.

We are astonished at thought, but sensation is equally wonderful.

How do we see physically? No differently that we do in our consciousness - by means of the productive power of imagination. Consciousness is the eye and ear, the sense for inner and outer meaning.

My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often.

But to me all sciences seem vain and full of error that are not born of experience, mother of all certainty, and do not terminate in an actual experience.

Seeing something once is better than hearing about it a hundred times. Doing something once is better than seeing it a hundred times.

There is a great probability that our loss of capacity for enjoying the positive joys of life is largely due to the decreased sensibility of our senses and our lack of full use of them. All human happiness is sensuous happiness.

There are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

You must learn to heed your senses. Humans use but a tiny percentage of theirs. They barely look, they rarely listen, they never smell, and they think that they can only experience feelings through their skin. But they talk, oh, do they talk.

It is better to see once than to hear a hundred times.

Gradually the conviction gained recognition that all knowledge about things is exclusively a working-over of the raw material furnished by the senses. ... Galileo and Hume first upheld this principle with full clarity and decisiveness.