Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance painter, engineer and scientist who is renowned today for his works like the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and for thousands of notebook pages full of sketches on anatomy, flight, water, and machines.But apart from just contributing to the arts, he was endlessly curious and enjoyed observing and experimenting with what was already known.All his words and pages are compiled in his book known as the Trattato della pittura (Treatise on Painting), where he once talked of a profound idea that is not only thought-provoking but also an interesting topic of discussion today.Every day, we trust our eyes and ears without a second thought. We see a puddle and step around it. We hear a voice and know whose it is. We read a headline and believe it, because it looks real and sounds sure of itself. Yet most of us have, at some point, been fooled by the very things we trusted most. A magician pulls a coin from thin air. A photo turns out to be edited. A rumour felt true because everyone repeated it.Long before smartphones, fake news, and deepfakes, Da Vinci was already asking an uncomfortable question: if even our senses can mislead us, what should we make of things that no sense can touch at all?Doubt has a bad name in many places. People often relate it to weakness or a lack of faith, or just being difficult. But doubt can also be a quiet kind of honesty.Let us find out what he actually meant to say.
Quote of the day
We must doubt the certainty of everything which passes through the senses, but how much more ought we to doubt things contrary to the senses, such as the existence of God and the soul
Leonardo da Vinci
What does the quote mean?
Leonardo da Vinci discusses this idea as a chain of reasoning, he means to say that our senses are how we meet the world, but they are not perfect. A stick looks bent in water, and a faraway tower looks tiny. In fact, not everything we blindly trust we know is honestly true, so instead of just giving way to blind faith, we must always resort to experimentation, self-verification, and go ahead with things and situations if we are reassured by things and what all is happening around us.If we must be careful even about what we see and touch, we should be even more careful about claims that no sense can check. Leonardo gives the existence of God and the soul as examples.Here he is not mocking religion or declaring that God and the soul do not exist. He is making a point about method. For Leonardo, reliable knowledge came from experience, which he called the mother of all certainty. Things that cannot be tested by experience, he felt, lead to endless argument rather than settled knowledge.However, it must be noted that Vinci’s words have become widely circulated over the years on quote websites like Goodreads, but these are trimmed, modern forms of a longer passage, which comes from his book Trattato della pittura (Treatise on Painting).But Leonardo never published that book himself; it was put together after his death from his notes, credited to his student Francesco Melzi. So the idea and essence behind the quote is genuinely his and has remained the same over the years, but the exact one-sentence version is a modern version of his words.
How are his words important today?
Even today, with the advancement of the digital world and AI tech, photos can be faked, voices can be cloned, and AI can generate videos in minutes that can look almost real and fool our eyes into believing them.These are the senses Leonardo asked us to double-check before believing, and they’re easier to fool than ever. Checking sources, asking where a claim came from, and waiting before sharing are modern forms of his advice.