Leonardo da Vinci — "I love those who can smile in trouble."
I love those who can smile in trouble.
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More from Leonardo da Vinci
"The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions."
"Thou, O God, dost sell us all good things at the price of labour."
"Birds, being provided with wings, can always fly where they wish, and so can men, if they have wings."
"Oh! how many are the times that I have been deceived!"
"Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most of it doesn't work. If it doesn't work, you do something else. The thing that works, you do more of."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Admiration for people who stay calm, even joyful, when things go wrong. Smiling in trouble isn't naivety — it's emotional resilience: the ability to hold onto inner peace when circumstances are hard. It values those who refuse to be broken by difficulty, who find something worth holding onto even in hardship. This kind of strength is rarer and more admirable than physical courage or intellectual brilliance.
Relevance to Leonardo da Vinci
Da Vinci faced relentless obstacles: illegitimate birth barred him from formal university education, his most ambitious projects collapsed — the bronze horse was never cast, Sforza patronage ended with Milan's fall — and he was investigated for sodomy in 1476. Yet his notebooks overflow with playful curiosity, jokes, riddles, and wonder alongside serious science. He embodied his own ideal, channeling frustration into exploration rather than bitterness through decades of unfinished work.
The era
Leonardo lived through extraordinary political turmoil — French invasions of Italy, the fall of Milan's Sforza dynasty, Borgia-era papal corruption, and the early tremors of the Protestant Reformation. Plague was still a living memory. Renaissance humanism deliberately cultivated stoic ideals, rediscovering Cicero and Marcus Aurelius to argue that inner virtue matters more than fortune. In this unstable world, smiling in trouble was a genuine philosophical ideal, not an empty platitude.
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