Michelangelo Quotes about Art

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

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.

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

No great work of art is ever finished.

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.

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

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

Genius is eternal patience.

Faith in oneself is the best and safest course.

Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.

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

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

Art lives on constraint and dies of freedom.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

I live and love in God's peculiar light.

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

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