Top 146 Sistine Chapel Quotes & Sayings

A visionary company is like a great work of art. Think of Michelangelo's scenes from Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or his statue of David. Think of a great and enduring novel like Huckleberry Finn or Crime and Punishment. Think of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or Shakespeare's Henry V. Think of a beautifully designed building, like the masterpieces of Frank Lloyd Wright or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. You can't point to any one single item that makes the whole thing work; it's the entire work-all the pieces working together to create an overall effect-that leads to enduring greatness.

Fashion is everywhere. Everywhere! Flowers are fashion to me, the sky is fashion, my garden is fashion. My darling, the Sistine Chapel is fashion.

Jack Nicholson is fairly gifted. We were at the Sistine Chapel, and everybody went from looking straight up to looking across the room at him.

Christians should ultimately do everything that we do with excellence. There's a story about repairs in the Sistine Chapel ... when some repair work was being done the craftsmen saw that the work on the other side of the plaster, the part not visible to the human eye was done with the same kind of craftsmanship that was done on what was visible and observable. And the explanation for that is that the work that Christians do is not just for human consumption, but it is also for the eyes of God.

Even Michelangelo got paid for doing the Sistine Chapel. To those artists who say they're doing it for the love of art, I say: Get real.

One can easily tell that the creator of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel was above all a sculptor

Mind you, Mount Rushmore isn't exactly the Parthenon or the Sistine Chapel either. After the naïve daftness of the Crazy Horse monument, I find the pompous idiocy of those four presidents somehow more risible still. Wishing to show respect or feel a vicarious thrill of admiration and pride, I can only giggle. For which I am very sorry. Any loyal American reading this who feels outraged and insulted is free to explode with derisive snorts of laughter at any British equivalent.

[The Freedom of Information Act is] the Taj Mahal of the Doctrine of Unanticipated Consequences, the Sistine Chapel of Cost-Benefit Analysis Ignored.

In the chapel you prayed to be a saint and now I will make you a god.

A peaceful home is as sacred a place as any chapel or cathedral.

The Tiger Rising is, again, about a motherless child. His name is Rob Horton. He is dealing with the death of his mother, when he and his father move to a new town. And two things happen the same day that Rob gets sent home. One is he meets a girl named Sistine Bailey, who is what my mother would call "a piece of work," and he finds a real tiger in a cage in the woods behind the motel where he lives with his dad. And that's the story: what happens with the Sistine tiger, the real tiger and Rob's grief.

When you go to the Sistine Chapel with Sophia Loren, it can be quite some time before your thoughts turn to the ceiling.

If no one ever took risks, Michaelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.

We have a priest at Inter Milan and a chapel at the training ground. That is where I was baptised and confirmed into the church.

Don't listen to those who say, you taking too big a chance. Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor, and it would surely be rubbed out by today.

When you're a kid, and someone's an artist, you think of Leonardo da Vinci. You don't think that's a job; you just think of a man with a beard, painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Nature is our chapel.

A story is like building a chapel; a novel is a cathedral.

If Michaelangelo or Leonardo Da Vinci were alive today they’d be making Avatar, not painting a chapel.

Communication has always been at the service of power. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel for the Pope. Is it not an advertisement for the Church? I try to make the best pictures I can and sometimes they are used in advertising campaigns.

I had always dreamed of living in Chapel Hill. When I was a college student at Hollins University in Virginia, I came down to Chapel Hill for summer school and just loved it.

The Christianity of the St Stephen's College I remember was atmospheric (how we loved the chapel, the choir and the Cross), cultural and entirely subtle.

If Michaelangelo were a heterosexual, the Sistine Chapel would have been painted basic white and with a roller.

Mining in BC's Sacred Headwaters is like drilling for oil in the Sistine Chapel

Back to the painting of the Sistine Chapel, there's always been run-ins between benefactors and artists.

Could five hundred men have painted the Sistine Chapel?

When you're at home for Duke-Carolina, you have a crowd of close to 10,000 around you, loving you. That's awesome. But it's also a lot of fun in Chapel Hill, where it's you, your teammates and your coaches, and no one else. I enjoyed the games at Chapel Hill a little more because of that.

When you're a kid and someone's an artist, you think of Leonardo da Vinci. You don't think that's a job; you just think of a man with a beard painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

When Michelangelo finished the painting of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling, he spent the rest of his life trying to remove the paint that had poured into his sleeve.

It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: it has been complicated, and therefore perfected, by what time had done to it

If God dislikes gays so much, how come he picked Michelangelo, a known homosexual, to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling while assigning Anita Bryant to go on television and push orange juice?

On Sofia Coppola's 16th birthday, way back in 1987, I stole a lip gloss from her Sistine Chapel of a bedroom. Years later, I left a Chanel lip gloss in the reception of the Mercer Hotel for her. You know why? I believe that you've got to fix your karma.

I'm not going for the sixteenth chapel.

Let me tell you, though: being the smartest boy in the world wasn’t easy. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want this. On the contrary, it was a huge burden. First, there was the task of keeping my brain perfectly protected. My cerebral cortex was a national treasure, a masterpiece of the Sistine Chapel of brains. This was not something that could be treated frivolously. If I could have locked it in a safe, I would have. Instead, I became obsessed with brain damage.

The splendor of a human heart that trusts it is loved unconditionally gives God more pleasure than Westminster Cathedral, the Sistine Chapel, Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony”, Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”, the sight of 10,000 butterflies in flight, or the scent of a million orchids in bloom. Trust is our gift back to God, and he finds it so enchanting that Jesus died for love of it.

The warmest place I've ever been is my home here in Chapel Hill. It's an oasis of comfort and joy for me.

I was raised in a Jewish family, but since I was adopted, my parents sent me to Hebrew school and Bible chapel, so I got the best of both worlds - singing in both a choir in Bible chapel and a chorus in Hebrew school. It shaped me and my voice.

I can think of so many tough guys that by definition it's their job to be tough and they're all in chapel. That's such a misconception and it's kind of gone out the window. Guys feel more comfortable going to chapel. I remember when I first started, guys were nervous about it and it was kind of a secret. There was still that stigma that came with it, but it's definitely been removed and (the faith movement) is definitely growing.

I was born in 1970 in Illinois, but all the life I remember I've spent in Chapel Hill, N.C.

Every morning, even in the bitterest winter, she stood before the chapel door until it opened at four and remained there until after the last Mass. Out from her Caughnawaga cabin at dawn and straight-way to chapel to adore the Blessed Sacrament, hear every Mass; back again during the day to hear instruction, and at night for a last prayer or Benediction.

St. Paul's Chapel stands - without so much as a broken window. Little miracle.

While Michael Angelo's Sistine roof, His "Morning" and his "Night" disclose How sinew that has been pulled tight, Or it may be loosened in repose, Can rule by supernatural right Yet be but sinew.

Why build a zoo when we can just put up a fence around Chapel Hill?

One can easily tell that the creator of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel was above all a sculptor.

It would have been the equivalent of Jackson Pollock's attempts to copy the Sistine Chapel.

The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.

I have never heard a dancer asking for advice about how to stay focused on her footwork, or a painter complaining about the dull day-to-day task of painting. What task worth doing isn't worth daily effort? Do you think Michelangelo was having fun the whole time he was on his back painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling?

There's no such thing as a coincidence in a prayer chapel.

For where God built a church, there the Devil would also build a chapel.

I love this site. It was lovingly hand-shaped it. Your soul transformed this into this art. It was perfect. I have tried to create another equal to it... but to no avail, so I will just have to paint the Sistine Chapel.

The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.

I went to the Garden of Love, And saw what I never had seen: A Chapel was built in the midst, Where I used to play on the green. And the gates of this Chapel were shut, And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door; So I turn'd to the Garden of Love, That so many sweet flowers bore. And I saw it was filled with graves, And tomb-stones where flowers should be: And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

Except during my childhood, when I was probably influenced by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel depiction of God with a flowing white beard, I have never tried to project the Creator in any kind of human likeness. The vociferous debates about whether God is male or female seem ridiculous to me. I think of God as an omnipotent and omniscient presence, a spirit that permeates the universe, the essence of truth, nature, being, and life. To me, these are profound and indescribable concepts that seem to be trivialized when expressed in words.

I don't really believe in political art. I feel in my heart the purpose of art transcends cultural and class and politics. I think something like the Sistine Chapel is something that goes beyond just being a Christian thing. It transcends its Christianity and becomes sort of a universal beauty. And I think that's true of music and art and literature.

The first decent building I did with my own practice was a chapel in Taiwan.

When I started out, I wanted to paint the Sistine Chapel. But I didn't have the content.

People who prefer e-books...think that books merely take up space. This is true, but so do your children and Prague and the Sistine Chapel.

We are lucky in Chapel Hill to have the most brilliant medical people anywhere in the country.

You may never see a Rembrandt or the Sistine Chapel, but aren't you glad as a human being they are still there? Probably the only thing that separates us from other creatures is that we aren't limited by our basic needs, like food and water; we have this sense of the whole.

How our old friend [Michelangelo] of the Sistine would have loved to photograph his workers, perched on the fragile planks. Dali was right to say Leonardo only worked from photographs.