Rating
3/5
Date Started
10/10/2023
Date Completed
11/16/2023
Five Powerful Quotes from the Book
Quote 1
“His lack of reverence for authority and his willingness to challenge received wisdom would lead him to craft an empirical approach for understanding nature that foreshadowed the scientific method developed more than a century later by Bacon and Galileo. His method was rooted in experiment, curiosity, and the ability to marvel at phenomena that the rest of us rarely pause to ponder after we’ve outgrown our wonder years. To that was added an intense desire and ability to observe the wonders of nature. …
“His curiosity, like that of Einstein, often was about phenomena that most people over the age of ten no longer puzzle about: Why is the sky blue? How are clouds formed? Why can our eyes see only in a straight line? What is yawning? …
“Kenneth Clark referred to Leonardo’s ‘inhumanly sharp eye.’ It’s a nice phrase, but misleading. Leonardo was human. The acuteness of his observational skill was not some superpower he possessed. Instead, it was a product of his own effort. That’s important, because it means that we can, if we wish, not just marvel at him but try to learn from him by pushing ourselves to look at things more curiously and intensely. …
“Being relentlessly and randomly curious about everything around us is something that each of us can push ourselves to do, every waking hour, just as he did.”
Quote 2
“As the offspring of a long line of notaries, Leonardo da Vinci had an instinct for keeping records. Jotting down observations, lists, ideas, and sketches came naturally. In the early 1480s, shortly after his arrival in Milan, he began his lifelong practice of keeping notebooks on a regular basis. …
“One purpose of these notebooks was to record interesting scenes, especially those involving people and emotions. ‘As you go about town,’ he wrote in one of them, ‘constantly observe, note, and consider the circumstances and behavior of men as they talk and quarrel, or laugh, or come to blows.’ For that purpose, he kept a small notebook hanging from his belt. …
“In their content, Leonardo’s were like nothing the world had ever, or has ever, seen. His notebooks have been rightly called ‘the most astonishing testament to the powers of human observation and imagination ever set down on paper.'”
Quote 3
“The more than 7,200 pages now extant probably represent about one-quarter of what Leonardo actually wrote, but that is a higher percentage after five hundred years than the percentage of Steve Jobs’s emails and digital documents from the 1990s that he and I were able to retrieve. Leonardo’s notebooks are nothing less than an astonishing windfall that provides the documentary record of applied creativity. …
“Take notes, on paper. Five hundred years later, Leonardo’s notebooks are around to astonish and inspire us. Fifty years from now, our own notebooks, if we work up the initiative to start writing them, will be around to astonish and inspire our grandchildren, unlike our tweets and Facebook posts.”
Quote 4
“The juxtapositions can seem haphazard, and to some extent they are; we watch his mind and pen leap from an insight about mechanics, to a doodle of hair curls and water eddies, to a drawing of a face, to an ingenious contraption, to an anatomical sketch, all accompanied by mirror-script notes and musings. But the joy of these juxtapositions is that they allow us to marvel at the beauty of a universal mind as it wanders exuberantly in free-range fashion over the arts and sciences and, by doing so, senses the connections in our cosmos. We can extract from his pages, as he did from nature’s, the patterns that underlie things that at first appear disconnected. …
“Ideas are often generated in physical gathering places where people with diverse interests encounter one another serendipitously. That is why Steve Jobs liked his buildings to have a central atrium and why the young Benjamin Franklin founded a club where the most interesting people of Philadelphia would gather every Friday. At the court of Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo found friends who could spark new ideas by rubbing together their diverse passions.”
Quote 5
“One mark of a great mind is the willingness to change it. We can see that in Leonardo. As he wrestled with his earth and water studies during the early 1500s, he ran into evidence that caused him to revise his belief in the microcosm-macrocosm analogy. It was Leonardo at his best, and we have the great fortune of being able to watch that evolution as he wrote the Codex Leicester. There he engaged in a dialogue between theories and experience, and when they conflicted he was receptive to trying a new theory. That willingness to surrender preconceptions was key to his creativity.”
About the Book
Original Date Published
10/17/2017
Leonardo da Vinci – Audiobook | Ebook | Hardcover – “The author of the acclaimed best sellers Benjamin Franklin, Einstein, and Steve Jobs delivers an engrossing biography of Leonardo da Vinci, the world’s most creative genius.
“Leonardo da Vinci created the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. But in his own mind, he was just as much a man of science and engineering. With a passion that sometimes became obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry. His ability to stand at the crossroads of the humanities and the sciences, made iconic by his drawing of Vitruvian Man, made him history’s most creative genius.
“Now Walter Isaacson brings Leonardo da Vinci to life, showing why we have much to learn from him. His combination of science, art, technology, and imagination remains an enduring recipe for creativity. So, too, was his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical. His relentless curiosity should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it – to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.”
About the Author
Walter Isaacson – “Walter Isaacson is a Professor of History at Tulane. He has been the editor of Time Magazine, the CEO and Chairman of CNN, and the CEO of the Aspen Institute. He is an advisory partner at Perella Weinberg, a financial services firm based in New York City, a cohost of the PBS show Amanpour & Co., a contributor to CNBC, and host of the podcast ‘Trailblazers, from Dell Technologies.’
“He is the author of Elon Musk (2023), The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race (2021), Leonardo da Vinci (2017), The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014), Steve Jobs (2011), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), and Kissinger: A Biography (1992), and coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986).”
Additional Resources
Tags
Biography & Autobiography | History | Nonfiction