Michelangelo Quotes (49 Quotes)


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

    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.

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

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

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


    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.

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

    I live in sin, to kill myself I live; no longer my life my own, but sin's; my good is given to me by heaven, my evil by myself, by my free will, of which I am deprived.

    A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

    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.


    Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.

    Faith in oneself is the best and safest course.

    Death and love are the two wings that bear the good man to heaven.

    The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.

    I hope that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.

    The greatest artist has no conception which a single block of white marble does not potentially contain within its mass, but only a hand obedient to the mind can penetrate to this image.

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

    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.

    What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?

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

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

    I feast on wine and bread, and feasts they are.

    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.


    It is well with me when only when I have a chisel in my hand

    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.

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

    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.

    Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.

    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

    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.

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

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

    Already at 16, 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.

    Trifles make perfection, but perfection is no trifle.

    It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand.

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

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


    I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

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


    What good I have comes from the pure air of your native Arezzo, and also because I sucked in chisels and hammers with my nurse's milk.

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

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


    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.

    There is no greater harm than that of time wasted.


    More Michelangelo Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Beauty - Mind - Art - Love - Perfection - Light - Heaven - Belief & Faith - Soul - Death & Dying - Mastery & Expertise - Wine - Angels - Time - Sin - Facts - Religions & Spirituality - Drawing & Painting - Pain - View All Michelangelo Quotations

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