Why do You Send Fools To judge My Work?

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.

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.

Souls will never ascend to Heaven until the sight of beauty lifts them there.

Let whoever may have attained to so much as to have the power of drawing know that he holds a great treasure.

In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.

The best of artists has no conception that the marble alone does not contain within itself.