Leonardo da Vinci

“These type of people who realize that God is in the details, those are the people who make great advances, and I put Leonardo in that category. I put Ben Franklin, Steve Jobs in that category, Jennifer Doudna, as she's trying to understand the inner workings o…”

“Sometimes the conception was more important to him than the execution, and when the execution became hard, or became something he didn't feel that he could hit out of the park, he just left it at the conceptual stage.”

“Leonardo da Vinci's curiosity was driven not because there was some utility to it, but because it delighted him.”

“Leonardo da Vinci, and Ben Franklin for that matter, were not necessarily the highest powered Intellectual firepower people of their time. Leonardo. Probably not as great of a, you know, intellectual as Luca Pacioli, his friend who was a mathematician. But wha…”

“And what amazed me when I saw that in Leonardo's notebooks was boom, it's in Einstein's notebooks. He writes, why is the sky blue? They both do experiments. Leonardo sprays water in the air and shines light through it. Einstein, you know, is using Lord Rayleig…”

“If you look at the very detail directly at the corner of the lips of the Mona Lisa, they actually aren't turned up. But as you move your head a little bit, and you catch the shadows and the colors better, the lips seem to turn up. So it becomes an interactive …”

“He invented uses of sketches that weren't reinvented until many years later because his sketches were unavailable.”