Ikigai Daily
Menu
StillnessQuote

Learning never exhausts the mind.

Leonardo da Vinci (attributed)

Mind

The story behind the card

No notebook or letter of Leonardo's contains this sentence, and it has not been traced to a dated early source, so it is best read as a popular attribution. It does echo a note he really wrote, in the Codex Atlanticus: iron rusts when it is not used, still water goes stale or freezes in the cold, and in the same way inaction wears down the strength of the mind. Leonardo (1452–1519) left more than 7,000 pages of notes on anatomy, water, optics, flight and much else.

Türkçe oku
Öğrenmek zihni asla tüketmez.
Leonardo da Vinci (atfedilir)

Leonardo'nun hiçbir defterinde ya da mektubunda bu cümle geçmez; tarihi belli erken bir kaynağa da bağlanamamıştır. Bu yüzden belgelenmiş bir alıntı değil, yaygın bir yakıştırma sayılmalı. Yine de Codex Atlanticus'ta gerçekten yazdığı bir notu hatırlatır: Kullanılmayan demir paslanır, durgun su bozulur ya da soğukta donar; hareketsizlik de zihnin gücünü aynı biçimde tüketir. Leonardo (1452–1519) anatomiden suya, ışıktan uçuşa uzanan konularda 7.000'i aşkın sayfa not bıraktı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Leonardo da Vinci
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

StillnessMind

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Without, everything seems discordant; only within does it coalesce into unity. Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.

Jung wrote this on 22 October 1916 to Fanny Bowditch, whom the Boston doctor James Jackson Putnam had sent to him for treatment. The letter opens with the same idea: as long as she looks at other people and projects her own psychology onto them, she can never be in harmony with herself. He adds that he is leaving for military service and will start work with her in December. Popular versions shorten the passage and turn “vision” into “visions”. The letter is in C. G. Jung: Letters, volume 1.

Carl Jung, letter (1916)Read card
StillnessLiterature

We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory.

Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) was a French doctor who spent four years as an army surgeon in the First World War and won the Prix Goncourt, France's best-known literary prize, in 1918. He wrote La Possession du monde (The Heart's Domain) during the war. Shortly before this line he recalls that the war let him see his child only seven times, each time barely recognising him; now he keeps seven images of him. Our feelings, he adds, take their true colour only later, like prints in a photographer's gold bath.

Georges Duhamel, The Heart's Domain (1919)Read card
StillnessLiterature

Do not trust your memory. It is a net full of holes. The most beautiful prizes slip through it.

From La Possession du monde (The Heart's Domain, 1919), which the French writer Georges Duhamel wrote while serving as an army surgeon in the First World War. In a chapter on sharing one's discoveries with others, he recalls a friend who said almost every day that he had had a beautiful thought that morning and lost it. So keep a small notebook, Duhamel advises: the soul is a rushing river carrying mud, grass, flowers and gold, and the nuggets must be set aside before the current takes them.

Georges DuhamelRead card
StillnessHealth

While you sleep, the brain strengthens what you learned during the day. This process, called memory consolidation, works both on facts, such as names and dates, and on skills, such as playing a piece of music. After a short or broken night, the brain holds on to new learning less well.

Memory consolidation is the slow process that turns a fresh, fragile memory into a lasting one, and much of it happens during sleep. In 1997 the German researchers Werner Plihal and Jan Born showed that different parts of the night help different kinds of memory. Twenty healthy men learned lists of word pairs and practised mirror tracing, drawing a shape while watching only its reflection. Recall of the word pairs improved most over the first half of the night, when deep, slow-wave sleep dominates, while the drawing skill improved most over the second half, when REM sleep, the stage of vivid dreams, lasts longer. Researchers think that during sleep the brain replays the day's experiences and moves new memories from temporary storage in the hippocampus, deep in the brain, into longer-lasting networks in its outer layer, the cortex.

Harvard Medical SchoolRead card
DriveHealth

Some benefits of exercise begin on the day you do it, according to US guidance promoted by the CDC. After a single session of moderate or vigorous activity, such as a brisk walk, blood pressure can fall, anxiety can ease, and sleep that night and some kinds of thinking can improve.

The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is the United States' national public health agency, founded in Atlanta in 1946. Its advice on exercise follows the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, whose second edition, published in 2018, drew on a review of the previous decade's research. Earlier advice had focused on preventing disease over the years; the new edition also listed benefits people can feel at once. Besides easing anxiety and lowering blood pressure, a single session helps the body respond to insulin, the hormone that moves sugar from the blood into cells. Most of these effects grow with regular activity, while others, such as fitness, strength and a lasting fall in blood pressure, take weeks or months. The guidelines recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate activity a week.

CDCRead card
Next card in the archiveThe height of sophistication is simplicity.Read next →