The Famous Quote That da Vinci Never Said

Palmpilot

Palmpilot

Touchdown! Greaser!
Joined
Apr 1, 2007
Messages
22,430
Location
PUDBY
Display Name
Display name:
Richard Palm
https://airfactsjournal.com/2020/08/the-famous-quote-that-da-vinci-never-said/

“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.”

This Leonardo da Vinci quote is everywhere — aviation books, magazines, websites, Instagram posts, coffee mugs, tee shirts, several science textbooks and some Smithsonian publications. It’s been repeated by the Washington Post newspaper, the Italian ambassador to the United States, and an executive director of The Leonardo museum. I saw it last year in big painted letters on the wall of a California flight school. It’s timeless emotion from a renaissance master of art and science. A flying quotation from maybe the most diversely talented genius ever to have lived, penned 400 years before the Wright Brothers flew. It’s evocatively magical and achingly relatable.

Yet Leonardo da Vinci never said it; and it’s nowhere close to 500 years old....​
 
Palmpilot said:
https://airfactsjournal.com/2020/08/the-famous-quote-that-da-vinci-never-said/

“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.”

This Leonardo da Vinci quote is everywhere — aviation books, magazines, websites, Instagram posts, coffee mugs, tee shirts, several science textbooks and some Smithsonian publications. It’s been repeated by the Washington Post newspaper, the Italian ambassador to the United States, and an executive director of The Leonardo museum. I saw it last year in big painted letters on the wall of a California flight school. It’s timeless emotion from a renaissance master of art and science. A flying quotation from maybe the most diversely talented genius ever to have lived, penned 400 years before the Wright Brothers flew. It’s evocatively magical and achingly relatable.

Yet Leonardo da Vinci never said it; and it’s nowhere close to 500 years old....​
Click to expand...
John Hermes Secondari. An American TV writer. In 1965.

From your posted source....
 
5f1c70c51e6cf93fab5a08c1dd9ebb36.jpg
 
Half Fast said:
Oh, baloney. Just because no one has yet found a record of Leonardo saying it, that doesn’t prove he didn’t.
Click to expand...
Well, while your statement is true in general, the article is quite convincing as to the source of the quote. And the fact that there are no recorded mentions of it for hundreds of years after DaVinci's death raises the question of how anyone would have known that he said it.
 
Half Fast said:
Oh, baloney. Just because no one has yet found a record of Leonardo saying it, that doesn’t prove he didn’t.
Click to expand...
Proving that someone who was born in the 15th century never said something is obviously impossible. I think the most that can be said is that a diligent search has failed to find proof that he did.

While I didn't regard it as impossible, I always wondered how a person who had never flown himself, or at least known people who had, could so accurately capture the experience of it.
 
Pilawt said:
Easy to spot a fake. DaVinci spoke Italian.
Click to expand...

That's right. What he actually wrote was, "Una volta che avrai assaporato il volo, camminerai per sempre sulla terra con gli occhi rivolti al cielo, perché lì sei stato e lì desidererai sempre tornare"
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top