Michelangelo Quotes
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Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.
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The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.
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To know each other is the best way to understand each other. To understand each other is the only way to love each other.
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True art is made noble and religious by the mind producing it.
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The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.
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And who is so barbarous as not to understand that the foot of a man is nobler than his shoe, and his skin nobler than that of the sheep with which he is clothed.
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I am still learning. (at age 87)
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Your greatness is measured by your horizons.
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There is no greater harm than that of time wasted.
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If there is some good in me, it is because I was born in the subtle atmosphere of your country of Arezzo. Along with the milk of my nurse I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer, with which I make my figures.
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A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to hear and see it.
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Perfection is no small thing, but it is made up of small things.
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What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?
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The hand that follows intellect can achieve.
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Whenever a great painter... does a work which appears to be false and lying, that falsity is very true.
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Your gifts lie in the place where your values, passions and strengths meet. Discovering that place is the first step toward sculpting your masterpiece, Your Life.
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My beard towards heaven, I feel my nape support / The back of my head, I grow the breast of a harpy / And my brush as it drips continually / Upon my face, makes it a gorgeous floor.
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Painting and sculpture, labour and good faith, have been my ruin and I continually go from bad to worse. Better it would have been for me if I had set myself to making matches in my youth. I should not be in such distress of mind.
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The more the marble wastes, The more the statue grows.
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Carving is easy, you just go down to the skin and stop.
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However rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man.
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The science of design, or of line-drawing, if you like to use this term, is the source and very essence of painting, sculpture, architecture... Sometimes... it seems to me that... all the works of the human brain and hand are either design itself or a branch of that art.
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I am a poor man and of little worth, who is laboring in that art that God has given me in order to extend my life as long as possible.
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As when, O lady mine, With chiselled touch, The stone unhewn and cold, Becomes a living mould, The more the marble wastes, The more the statue grows.