Leonardo da Vinci — "Oh, how many times have I been deceived by my own opinions!"
Oh, how many times have I been deceived by my own opinions!
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More from Leonardo da Vinci
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence."
"He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year."
"The memory of all that is past is as nothing in comparison with the knowledge of what is to come."
"Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge."
"The greatest gift is the passion for reading."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Personal opinions and intuitions can mislead us even when we trust them completely. This is a raw admission that assumptions we hold confidently — about how the world works, what we observe, what we believe to be true — regularly turn out wrong. Self-deception isn't only lies we tell others; it's the bias baked into our own perception and reasoning that distorts what we see before we can even question it.
Relevance to Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo filled thousands of notebook pages correcting his own earlier drawings and theories — his anatomical studies alone went through multiple revisions as dissection exposed errors in prior assumptions. He rejected inherited authority yet remained equally suspicious of his own interpretations. His empirical philosophy — 'experience is the mother of all knowledge' — demanded constant self-correction. This quote captures the frustrating flip side: even firsthand observation, filtered through his own mind, could betray him.
The era
In the early 1500s, European thinkers were abandoning medieval reliance on ancient authorities — Aristotle, Galen, Church doctrine — and turning to direct observation. But the scientific method hadn't yet been codified; Bacon's inductive framework came a century later. Without established protocols for testing ideas, thinkers like Leonardo navigated a treacherous gap: they'd rejected external authority but had no systematic protection against their own biases. Admitting personal fallibility was itself a quietly radical intellectual act.
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