evidence: FACT CHECK: Did Da Vinci Say, ‘I Awoke, Only To Find That The Rest Of The World Was Still Asleep’? [...] There is no evidence that da Vinci authored this saying. It may be a version of a statement written about him by Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud. [...] "In Merezhkovsky’s admirable simile, he was like a man who had awoken too early in the darkness, while everyone else was still asleep," Freud wrote, crediting Russian author Dmitry Merezhkovsky with the imagery.