"You should often amuse yourself when you..." - Quote by Leonardo Da Vinci
You should often amuse yourself when you take a walk for recreation, in watching and taking note of the attitudes and actions of men as they talk and dispute, or laugh or come to blows with one another... noting these down with rapid strokes, in a little pocket-book which you ought always to carry with you.
More by Leonardo Da Vinci
“Black is like a broken vessel, which is deprived of the capacity to contain anything.”
“One has no right to love or hate anything if one has not acquired a thorough knowledge of its nature. Great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you know it but little you will be able to love it only a little or not at all.”
“My body is not a tomb for animals.”
More on Observation
“Next you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping. . . you'd see the ax flash and come down-you don't hear nothing; you see the ax go up again, and by the time it's above the man's head then you hear the k'chunk!-it had took all that time to come over the water.”
“A deaf and dumb person who sees two men in conversation - may nevertheless understand from the attitudes and gestures of the speakers, how well their discussion is getting along.”
“We met Dr. Hall in such deep mourning that either his mother, his wife, or himself must be dead.”
More on Human Behavior
“The terrible tabulation of the French statists brings every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to exact numerical ratios. If one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats shoes, or marries his grandmother, then, in every twenty thousand, or thirty thousand, is found one man who eats shoes, or marries his grandmother.”
“Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true.”
“People's minds are changed through observation and not through argument.”