Michelangelo Quotes
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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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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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Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come.
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A great sculpture can roll down a hill without breaking.
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Why do You Send Fools To judge My Work?
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I cannot live under pressures from patrons, let alone paint.
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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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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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My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth's loveliness.
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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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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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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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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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If the wine is not good, then throw it out!
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Do you know that women who are chaste remain much fresher than those who are not?
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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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An artist must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye.
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Even if you are divine, you don't disdain male consorts.
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Genius is infinite painstaking.
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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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The best artist has that thought alone Which is contained within the marble shell; The sculptor's hand can only break the spell To free the figures slumbering in the stone.
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I couldn't give you something mediocre even if that's all you asked for.
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I already have a wife who is too much for me.. she is my art, and my works are my children.
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When they asked Michelangelo how he made his statue of David he is reported to have said, "It is easy. You just chip away the stone that doesn't look like David.