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Lorenzo de' Medici seeks highly skilled, aesthetically oriented individual to conceive and implement several major public projects. You are a generalist with sound training in structural engineering, synthesis of pigments and Christian iconography. Some climbing involved.
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Already at sixteen, my mind was a battlefield: my love of pagan beauty, the male nude, at war with my religious faith. A polarity of themes and forms: one spiritual, the other earthly.
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Many believe – and I believe – that I have been designated for this work by God. In spite of my old age, I do not want to give it up; I work out of love for God and I put all my hope in Him.
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Do not fret, for God did not create us to abandon us.
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Poets and painters have the power to dare, I mean to dare to do whatever they may approve of.
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Critique by creating.
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And still I am learning.
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Only God creates. The rest of us just copy.
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It is necessary to keep one's compass in one's eyes and not in the hand, for the hands execute, but the eye judges.
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Heaven-born, the soul a heavenward course must hold; beyond the world she soars; the wise man, I affirm, can find no rest in that which perishes, nor will he lend his heart to ought that doth time depend.
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It is therefore indisputable that the limbs of architecture are derived from the limbs of man.
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A good sculpture can be rolled downhill without breaking.
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You must know that I am, of all men who were ever born, the most inclined to love persons. Whenever I behold someone who possesses any talent or displays any dexterity of mind, who can do or say something more appropriately than the rest of the world, I am compelled to fall in love with him; and then I give myself up to him so entirely that I am no longer my own property, but wholly his.
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The idea is there locked inside. All you have to do is remove the excess stone.
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If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.
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Can't you see the angel imprisoned in the block of stone trying to get out? I am trying to free him.
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Draw, Antonio; draw, Antonio; draw and don’t waste time.
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I live and love in God's peculiar light.
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So take care of your life and take notice and be observant, for the number of widows is always far greater than the number of widowers.
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I live in sin, to kill myself I live; no longer my life my own, but sin's; my good is given to me by heaven, my evil by myself, by my free will, of which I am deprived.
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An artist does his most difficult work when he steps back from the blank canvas and thinks about what he is going to create.
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My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth's loveliness.
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If people knew how hard I worked at my art, they would not consider me a genius.
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If it be true that any beautiful thing raises the pure and just desire of man from earth to God, the eternal fount of all, such I believe my love.