Leonardo Da Vinci / Walter Isaacson

• As he aged, he pursued his scientific inquiries not just to serve his art but out of a joyful instinct to fathom the profound beauties of creation: how the ability to make connections across disciplines- arts and sciences, humanities and technology - is a key to innovation, imagination, and genius.
• Vision without execution is hallucination. but I also came to believe that his ability to blur the line between reality and fantasy, just like his sfumato techniques for blurring the lines of a painting, was a key to his creativity. Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo new how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history's consummate innovator.
• How a desire to marvel about the world that we encounter each day can make each moment of our lives richer.
• Notoriously, he left many of his paintings unfinished.
• Illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical
• mainly self-taught
• never ceased drawing and sculpting
• Salai, the little devil
• Leonardo was never known to have had a relationship with a woman.
• It is necessary for the painter, in order to be good at arranging the parts of the body in attitudes and gestures which can be represented in the nude, to know the anatomy of the sinews, bones and muscles and tendons.
• He never sold and gave away. he did not like to let go. that is why he would die with some of his masterpieces still near his bedside.
• There is no perfect gift without great suffering.
• Instinct for keeping records - his lifelong practice of keeping notebooks on a regular basis. he noted it in a little book which he was always carrying in his belt.
• to-do lists, records of expenses, and sketches of people
• a relentlessly curious explorer
• Became interested not only in how things work but why
• was not motivated by wealth or material possessions. truly dependable wealth of the mind.
• Leonardo knew the joys and advantages of having a team.
• His drawing of him is feminine tat even some art critics have referred to him as a female.
• He never painted romance or eros. instead, two themes dominate. the painting conveys a domestic and familial harmony.