Michelangelo Quotes
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I cannot live under pressures from patrons, let alone paint.
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I sometimes set myself thinking and imagining that I find amongst men but one single art or science, and that is drawing or painting, all others being members proceeding therefrom.
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My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth's loveliness.
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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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The best of artists hath no thought to show which the rough stone in its superfluous shell doth not include; to break the marble spell is all the hand that serves the brain can do.
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Good painting is nothing else but a copy of the perfections of God and a reminder of His painting. Finally, good painting is a music and a melody which intellect only can appreciate, and with great difficulty.
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The art of creation lies in the gift of perceiving the particular and generalizing it, thus creating the particular again. It is therefore a powerful transforming force and a generator of creative solutions in relation to a given problem.
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The mind, the soul, becomes ennobled by the endeavour to create something perfect, for God is perfection, and whoever strives after perfection is striving for something devine.
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Painters are not in any way unsociable through pride, but either because they find few pursuits equal to painting, or in order not to corrupt themselves with the useless conversation of idle people, and debase the intellect from the lofty imaginations in which they are always absorbed.
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I am always learning.
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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.
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It is better decoration when, in painting, some monstrosity is introduced for variety and a relaxation of the senses and to attract the attention of mortal eyes, which at times desire to see that which they have never seen.
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There is no tongue to speak his eulogy; Too brightly burned his splendour for our eyes: Far easier to condemn his injurers, Than for the tongue to reach his smallest worth. He to the realms of sinfulness came down, To teach mankind; ascending then to God, Heaven unbarred to him her lofty gates, To whom his country hers refused to ope. Ungrateful land, to its own injury Nurse of his fate! Well too does this instruct, That greatest ills fall to the perfectest. And 'midst a thousand proofs, let this suffice, That, as his exile had no parallel, So never was there man more great than he.
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After four tortured years, more than 400 over life-sized figures, I felt as old and as weary as Jeremiah. I was only 37, yet friends did not recognize the old man I had become.
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Why do You Send Fools To judge My Work?
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Is it any wonder, since, when near the fire, I was melted and burned, if now that it's extinguished outside me, it besets and consumes me inside, and bit by bit reduces me to ashes?
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If the wine is not good, then throw it out!
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An artist must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye.
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If in my youth I had realized that the sustaining splendour of beauty of with which I was in love would one day flood back into my heart, there to ignite a flame that would torture me without end, how gladly would I have put out the light in my eyes.
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A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.