Michelangelo Quotes

For those who feel it, nothing makes the soul so religious and pure as the endeavor to create something perfect; for God is perfection, and whoever strives after it, is striving after something divine. True painting is only the image of the perfection of God, a shadow of the pencil with which he paints, a melody, a striving after harmony.

Art is a shadow of Divine perfection.

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

The power of one fair face makes my love sublime, for it has weaned my heart from low desires.

If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.

The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.

Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come.

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.

Let it be enough for you to have bread and live virtuously and poorly like Christ, as I do here. I live meanly and don't bother about life or honor ... and I live with the greatest toil and a thousand worries. It is now about 15 years since I had a happy hour.

I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.

Carving is easy, you just go down to the skin and stop.

Your gifts lie in the place where your values, passions and strengths meet. Discovering that place is the first step toward sculpting your masterpiece, Your Life.

He who follows another will never overtake him

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

Art lives on constraint and dies of freedom.

Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.

From such a gentle thing, from such a fountain of all delight, my every pain is born.

Many believe - and I believe - that I have been designated for this work by God. In spite of my old age, I do not want to give it up; I work out of love for God and I put all my hope in Him.

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.

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.

To know each other is the best way to understand each other. To understand each other is the only way to love each other.

If I love in thee, beloved, only what thou lovest most, do not be angry; for so one spirit is enamoured of another.

If we have been pleased with life, we should not be displeased with death, since it comes from the hand of the same master.

I criticise by creation, not by finding fault.

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

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.

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.

Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.

Beauty depends on purpose. It is in the elements best suited to their purpose or aim that beauty shines forth most strongly.

With few words I shall make thee understand my soul.

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

Genius is infinite painstaking.

However rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man.

He who does not master the nude cannot understand the principles of architecture.