Vitality and beauty are gifts of Nature for those who live according to its laws.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The eyes and ears are essential for perceiving and appreciating the beauty of the world around us.
In this quote, Leonardo Da Vinci underscores the importance of our senses—specifically sight and hearing—in experiencing and understanding the beauty and complexity of nature. He suggests that through our eyes, which he metaphorically describes as the 'window of the soul', we gain the most profound insights into the natural world. The quote highlights how our ability to observe and listen enriches our appreciation of the infinite wonders of our environment.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a nature conservation speech to emphasize the importance of preserving our environment.
More from Leonardo Da Vinci
All quotes →Small rooms or dwellings set the mind in the right path, large ones cause it to go astray.
Patience serves us against insults precisely as clothes do against the cold. For if you multiply your garments as the cold increases, that cold cannot hurt you; in the same way increase your patience under great offenses, and they cannot hurt your feelings.
The smallest feline is a masterpiece.
For, verily, great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it, you will be able to love it only little or not at all.
It is a far worthier thing to read by the light of experience than to adorn oneself with the labors of others.
Similar quotes
If you can't be in awe of Mother Nature, there's something wrong with you.
We cannot interfere in one area of the ecosystem without paying due attention to both the consequences of such interference in other areas and to the well-being of future generations.
Mother Earth needs us to keep our covenant. We will do this in courts, we will do this on our radio station, and we will commit to our descendants to work hard to protect this land and water for them. Whether you have feet, wings, fins, or roots, we are all in it together.
As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life - a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no "high-minded orientation," no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.
... it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an 'environmental crisis' because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, god-given world.
He who knows the activities of Nature lives according to Nature.