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.

Trifles make perfection but perfection is not a trifle

Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.

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.

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.

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.

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.