Michelangelo Quotes - Page 3

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

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.

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

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

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

Why do You Send Fools To judge My Work?

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.

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

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

Patience is eternal genius

Critique by creating.

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.

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.

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

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.

Trifles make perfection but perfection is not a trifle

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.

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

The hand that follows intellect can achieve.

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.

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.

Genius is infinite painstaking.

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.

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.

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.