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.

The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has.

Death and love are the two wings that bear the good man to heaven.

Love is a beautiful image Imagined or seen within the heart, The friend of virtue and gentility.

I created a vision of David in my mind and simply carved away everything that was not David.

A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to hear and see it.

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.