Leonardo da Vinci — "The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions."
The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
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"Oh, how many times have I been deceived by my own opinions!"
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Understanding this quote
What it means
People are most reliably deceived not by con artists or enemies, but by their own unchecked assumptions and biases. When we mistake opinion for objective truth, we stop perceiving reality clearly and instead filter everything through what we already believe. This self-deception is uniquely dangerous because we cannot guard against a lie we don't recognize as one — we have already accepted it as fact.
Relevance to Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo built his entire intellectual identity on direct observation over received dogma — his guiding principle was essentially 'know how to see.' He repeatedly challenged Aristotelian orthodoxy and corrected ancient anatomists like Galen through dissection. His notebooks show relentless self-revision. As a self-taught polymath crossing art, anatomy, engineering, and optics, he witnessed daily how scholars defending inherited opinions blocked the empirical discoveries he was actively making.
The era
Renaissance Italy was rediscovering classical antiquity but often treated ancient authorities like Aristotle and Galen as infallible. Scholastic tradition calcified these 1,500-year-old opinions into doctrine that could not be questioned. Meanwhile, the printing press was accelerating the spread of both knowledge and unfounded belief. Leonardo lived precisely at the fault line where reverence for inherited opinion clashed with a new commitment to direct, empirical investigation of the natural world.
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