Michelangelo Quotes

Art is a jealous thing; it requires the whole and entire man.

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.

I give my soul to God, my body to the earth, and my worldly possessions to my nearest of kin, charging them to remember the sufferings of Jesus Christ.

There is no tongue to speak his eulogy; Too brightly burned his splendor 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 heres refused to ope. Ungrateful land! 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.

The hand that follows intellect can achieve.

The science of design, or of line-drawing, if you like to use this term, is the source and very essence of painting, sculpture, architecture ... Sometimes ... it seems to me that ... all the works of the human brain and hand are either design itself or a branch of that art.

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.

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.

My beard towards heaven, I feel my nape support / The back of my head, I grow the breast of a harpy / And my brush as it drips continually / Upon my face, makes it a gorgeous floor.

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

I always liked instrumental music, and I think there's a vehicle out there for it. I think a true artist not only records, but you have to perform and you have to have some kind of consistent output. You can't just put out an album every ten years and never play - that's not an artist, that's something else. But I find there's always been a vehicle for what I've done, because I get out there and play all the time. I say 12 hundred shows on my website just in case, because we can't verify it, but it's more like 15 hundred!

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.

Art is a shadow of Divine perfection.

Only God creates. The rest of us just copy.

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.

A good artist ought never to allow impatience to overcome his sense of the main end of art - perfection

Art is the gift of God, and must be used unto His glory. That in art is highest which aims at this.

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

The idea is there locked inside. All you have to do is remove the excess stone.

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

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.

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

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 ...

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.

It is therefore indisputable that the limbs of architecture are derived from the limbs of man.

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

I am no artist - please come and help me.

It is not sufficient merely to be a great master in painting and very wise, but I think that it is necessary for the painter to be very moral in his mode of life, or even, if such were possible, a saint, so that the Holy Spirit may inspire his intellect.

I cannot live under pressures from patrons, let alone paint.

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

I already have a wife who is too much for me.. she is my art, and my works are my children.

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.

One paints with one's head, not one's hand.

Painting and sculpture, labour and good faith, have been my ruin and I continually go from bad to worse. Better it would have been for me if I had set myself to making matches in my youth. I should not be in such distress of mind.

What one has most to work and struggle for in painting is to do the work with a great amount of labour and sweat in such a way that it may afterward appear, however much it was laboured upon, to have been done almost quickly and almost without any labour, and very easily, although it was not.

Can't you see the angel imprisoned in the block of stone trying to get out? I am trying to free him

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.

And still I am learning.

My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth's loveliness.

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

Do you know that women who are chaste remain much fresher than those who are not?

No one has mastery, Before he is at the end, Of his art and his life.

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.

I live and love in God's peculiar light.

A good sculpture can be rolled downhill without breaking.

Nature did all things well

You must know that I am, of all men who were ever born, the most inclined to love persons. Whenever I behold someone who possesses any talent or displays any dexterity of mind, who can do or say something more appropriately than the rest of the world, I am compelled to fall in love with him; and then I give myself up to him so entirely that I am no longer my own property, but wholly his.

Love lent me wings; my path was like a stair;
A lamp unto my feet, that sun was given;
And death was safety and great joy to find;
But dying now, I shall not climb to Heaven.

Faith in oneself is the best and safest course.

Do not fret, for God did not create us to abandon us.

The promises of this world are, for the most part, vain phantoms; and to confide in one's self, and become something of worth and value is the best and safest course.

Forgiveness is divine, but never pay pull price for late pizza.

Lord, make me see thy glory in every place.

So now, from this mad passion Which made me take art for an idol and a king I have learnt the burden of error that it bore And what misfortune springs from man's desire ... The world's frivolities have robbed me of the time That I was given for reflecting upon God.

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.

There is an angel imprisoned in it and I must set it free.

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

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

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

Genius is infinite painstaking.

I dare affirm that any artist ... who has nothing singular, eccentric, or at least reputed to be so, in his person, will never become a superior talent.

Even if you are divine, you don't disdain male consorts.

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.

Perchance that I might learn what pity is, That I might laugh at erring men no more.

Sculpture is made by taking away, while painting is made by adding.

What do you despise? By this you are truly known.

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.

Perfection is no small thing, but it is made up of small things.

I saw an angel in the block of marble and I just chiseled until I set him free.

Serene I fold my hands and wait.

I serve for the love of God and in Him have all my hope.

Gazing on beautiful things acts on my soul.

If there is some good in me, it is because I was born in the subtle atmosphere of your country of Arezzo. Along with the milk of my nurse I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer, with which I make my figures.

An artist must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye.

An artist does his most difficult work when he steps back from the blank canvas and thinks about what he is going to create.