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.

Men born in hot countries love the night because it refreshes them and have a horror of light because it burns them.

I wish to work miracles.

The painter strives and competes with nature.

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, but not with a corresponding degree of strength, though it is deficient only in the power of maintaining equilibrium. We may therefore say that such an instrument constructed by man is lacking in nothing except the life of the bird, and this life must needs be supplied from that of man.

Music... is the shaping of the invisible.

This work should commence with the conception of man, and should describe the nature of the womb, and how the child inhabits it, and in what stage it dwells there, and the manner of its quickening and feeding, and its growth, and what interval there is between one stage of growth and another, and what thing drives it forth from the body of the mother, and for what reason it sometimes emerges from the belly of its mother before the due time.