Leonardo Da Vinci

A well-spent day brings happy sleep.

All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power.

For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.

He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.

Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.

I have wasted my hours.

I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but they whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue their principles unto death.

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.

Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation... even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.

It's easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

Learning never exhausts the mind.

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.

Life well spent is long.

Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.

Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.

Nature never breaks her own laws.

Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.

Our life is made by the death of others.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.

The smallest feline is a masterpiece.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.

Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.

Water is the driving force of all nature.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

Who sows virtue reaps honor.

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.

Pablo Picasso Quotes

At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.

Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dali.

Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

I don't do drugs. I am drugs.

I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.

In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.

Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.

Let my enemies devour each other.

Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.

Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.

Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad.

The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.

There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

Paul Roberts - Photo Realistic Art

The other day I was trawling the Internet looking for inspiration for my next painting. I came across an artist whose photo realistic paintings were very impressive. I have aggregated some of them here. Paul Roberts was born in Tiverton, Devon in 1948. He is also the former lead singer and songwriter of Sniff 'n' the Tears.

Roberts was brought up in Wales by his parents, both themselves artists. He studied at Newport College of Art, Cardiff College of Art and Goldsmiths College of Art, he gained early recognition as a painter in the 1970s before his career was interrupted by worldwide success with the rock band Sniff 'n' the Tears in 1978.

In 1988 he moved with his family to Somerset. Until 2000, his music commitments limited the time he had available to develop as a painter.