Best 128 quotes of Michelangelo on MyQuotes

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

A great sculpture can roll down a hill without breaking.

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.

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

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

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

And who is so barbarous as not to understand that the foot of a man is nobler than his shoe, and his skin nobler than that of the sheep with which he is clothed.

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

Art is a shadow of Divine perfection.

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

Art lives on constraint and dies of freedom.

As when, O lady mine, With chiselled touch, The stone unhewn and cold, Becomes a living mould, The more the marble wastes, The more the statue grows.

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

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

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

Critique by creating.

Dear to me is sleep: still more, being made of stone, While pain and guilt still linger here below, Blindness and numbness--these please me alone; Then do not wake me, keep your voices low.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Faith in oneself is the best and safest course.

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.

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

Gazing on beautiful things acts on my soul.

Genius is eternal patience.

Genius is infinite painstaking.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I am no artist - please come and help me.

I am still learning. (at age 87)

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

I criticise by creation, not by finding fault.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

If people knew how hard I worked at my art, they would not consider me a genius.

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

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.

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