Sublime

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

that depth of mindlessness which calls itself the modern mind.

“If you deprive cholesterol from the brain, then you directly affect the machinery that triggers the release of neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters affect the data-processing and memory functions. In other words—how smart you are and how well you remember things.”

Science seems to be the only branch of study in which people have to be waved back from perfection as from a pestilence.

—reminds me of Buckle whom I once met at Hensleigh Wedgwood's. I was very glad to learn from him his system of collecting facts. He told me that he bought all the books which he read, and made a full index, to each, of the facts which he thought might prove serviceable to him, and that he could always remember in what book he had read anything, for

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 b

Leonardo was a genius, one of the few people in history who indisputably deserved—or, to be more precise, earned—that appellation. Yet it is also true that he was a mere mortal.