Top 151 Quotes & Sayings by Michelangelo - Page 2

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

The mind, the soul, becomes ennobled by the endeavour to create something perfect, for God is perfection, and whoever strives after perfection is striving for something devine.

Art lives on constraint and dies of freedom.

I am always learning.

Genius is infinite painstaking.

Critique by creating.

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

Why do You Send Fools To judge My Work?

The greatest risk to man is not that he aims to high and misses, but that he aims to low and hits.

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

The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.

True art is made noble and religious by the mind producing it.

He who follows another will never overtake him

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.

Trifles make perfection but perfection is not a trifle

Patience is eternal genius

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

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.

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

As you give out, so shall you receive.

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.

I am still learning. (at age 87)

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.

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.

To touch is to give life.

So take care of your life and take notice and be observant, for the number of widows is always far greater than the number of widowers.

Read the heart and not the letter for the pen cannot draw near the good intent.

Led by long years to my last hours, too late, O world, I know your joys for what they are. You promise a peace which is not yours to give and the repose that dies before it is born. The years of fear and shame to which Heaven now set a term, renew nothing in me but the old sweet error in which, living overlong a man kills his soul with no gain to his body. I say and I know having put it to the proof, that he has the better part in Heaven whose death falls nearest his birth.

I criticise by creation, not by finding fault.

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.

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.

With few words I shall make thee understand my soul.

Do not be concerned that you might set a target too high and fail. Be concerned that you will set it too low and succeed.

Lord, make me see thy glory in every place.

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

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

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

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.

The hand that follows intellect can achieve.

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.

Heaven-born, the soul a heavenward course must hold; beyond the world she soars; the wise man, I affirm, can find no rest in that which perishes, nor will he lend his heart to ought that doth time depend

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.

Draw, Antonio; draw, Antonio; draw and don’t waste time.

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

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

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.

No thought is born in me that does not bear the image of death.

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

And still I am learning.

Serene I fold my hands and wait.

If I am more alive because love burns and chars me, as a fire, given wood or wind, feels new elation, it's that he who lays me low is my salvation, and invigorates the more, the more he scars me.

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.

The great tragedy of life is not that people set their sights too high and fail to achieve their goals but that they set their sights too low and do.

Nature did all things well

How wrong are those simpletons, of whom the world is full, who look more at... color than at the figures which show spirit and movement.

Good painting is nothing else but a copy of the perfections of God and a reminder of His painting. Finally, good painting is a music and a melody which intellect only can appreciate, and with great difficulty.

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

If the wine is not good, then throw it out!

The more the marble wastes, The more the statue grows.

Poets and painters have the power to dare, I mean to dare to do whatever they may approve of.