GREAT AVIATION QUOTES
Leonardo
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There are 8 quotes matching Leonardo in the collection:
He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machines.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Regards Leonardo da Vinci. Widely cited, including Jean Renoir’s intimate biography Renior, My Father, 1962.
A bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law, which instrument it is within the capacity of man to reproduce with all its movements.
Leonardo da Vinci
Codex on the Flight of Birds, circa 1505.
See three other Leonardo da Vinci great aviation quotes.
Feathers shall raise men even as they do birds, towards heaven; that is by letters written with their quills.
Leonardo da Vinci
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci: Arranged, Rendered into English and Introduced by Edward MacCurdy, 1938.
See three other Leonardo da Vinci great aviation quotes.
I have discovered that a screw-shaped device such as this, if it is well made from starched linen, will rise in the air if turned quickly.
Leonardo da Vinci
Codex Atlanticus, describing his (never built) Helical Air Screw, 1478-1519.
See three other Leonardo da Vinci great aviation quotes.
The great bird will take its first flight … filling the world with amazement and all records with its fame, and it will bring eternal glory to the nest where it was born.
Leonardo da Vinci
On the cover of the Codice Sul Volo degli Uccelli, 1505.
See three other Leonardo da Vinci great aviation quotes.
But why do so many people dream of being able to fly? The answer that psycho-analysis gives is that to fly or to be a bird is only a disguise for another wish, and that more than one bridge, involving words or things, leads us to recognize what it is When we consider that inquisitive children are told that babies are brought by a large bird, such as the stork; when we find that the ancients represented the phallus as having wings; that the commonest expression in German for male sexual activity is vögeln [‘to bird’: Volgel is the German for ‘bird’]; that the male organ is actually called l’ucello [the bird] in Italian — all of these are only small fragments from a whole mass of connected ideas, from which we learn that in dreams the wish to be able to fly is to be understood as nothing else than the longing to be capable of sexual performance.
Sigmund Freud
Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, 1964 Alan Tyson translation, published as Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci, 1910.
When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.
John Secondari
This may be one of the most famous aviation quotes — but it wasn’t Leonardo! It’s attributed everywhere to him (including some Smithsonian publications, The Washington Post newspaper and a couple of science quotation books) — but he never said or wrote it. For the full story on who did, see my August 2020 article in Air Facts magazine The Famous Quote That Da Vinci Never Said.
The genius of Leonardo da Vinci imagined a flying machine, but it took the methodical application of science by these two American bicycle mechanics to create it.
Bill Gates
Chairman and CEO of Microsoft. Aviators: The Wright Brothers, Time magazine, 29 March 1999.
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