At the age of 55 Leonard da Vinci set out to organize his ideas from a review of the thousands of pages of notebooks he had produced over an intensely productive lifetime.  He begins with “Begun at Florence in the house of Piero di Braccio Martelli, on the 22nd day of March, 1508; and this is to be a collection without order, taken from many papers which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later, each in its place, according to the various subjects treated.”  The result is Thoughts on Life and Art, a collection of thoughts made in simple statements, some as short as one sentence, many a single paragraph, seldom more. Many take on the character of an epigram, an axiom, perhaps a revelation. Others show a keen mind quickly paring a subject down to its essence. Each idea seems described as it occurred to Leonardo in the instant of its conception. There 333 entries in all, organized into three groups: 129 Thoughts on Life, 93 Thoughts on Art, and 111 Thoughts on Science.   The book was assembled by editor Lewis Einstein and contains a Table of References that lists the nineteen source documents with a listing by page and thought for each section showing the source document.  It was initially published by the Merrymount Press in Boston in 1906 in a run of 303 copies.  It is a remarkable digest of the workings of one of the greatest minds ever to grace the planet.

Play sample: 

Download a PDF datasheet