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Quotes by Michelangelo

Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.
– Michelangelo
A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to hear and see it.
– Michelangelo
A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.
– Michelangelo
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.
– Michelangelo
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.
– Michelangelo
Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.
– Michelangelo
Death and love are the two wings that bear the good man to heaven.
– Michelangelo
Faith in oneself is the best and safest course.
– Michelangelo
Genius is eternal patience.
– Michelangelo
Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.
– Michelangelo
His hope is treacherous only whose love dies with beauty, which is varying every hour, bit, in chaste hearts uninfluenced by the power of outward change, there blooms a deathless flower, that breathes on earth the air of paradise.
– Michelangelo
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.
– Michelangelo
I am still learning.
– Michelangelo
I cannot live under pressures from patrons, let alone paint.
– Michelangelo
I feast on wine and bread, and feasts they are.
– Michelangelo
I live and love in God's peculiar light.
– Michelangelo
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.
– Michelangelo
I saw the angel in the marble and I carved until I set him free.
– Michelangelo
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.
– Michelangelo
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.
– Michelangelo
If we have been pleased with life, we should not be displeased with death, since it comes from the hand of the same master.
– Michelangelo
It is better docration when, in painting, some monstrosity is introduced for variety and a relaxation of the sense and to attract the attention of mortal eyes, which at times desire to see that which they have never seen.
– Michelangelo
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.
– Michelangelo
Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.
– Michelangelo
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.
– Michelangelo
My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth's loveliness.
– Michelangelo
Painters are not in any way unsociable through pride, but either because they find few pursuits equal to painting, or in order not to corrupt themselves with the useless conversation of idle people, and debase the intellect from the lofty imaginations in which they are always absorbed.
– Michelangelo
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.
– Michelangelo
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.
– Michelangelo
The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has.
– Michelangelo
The power of one fair face makes my love sublime, for it has weaned my heart from low desires.
– Michelangelo
The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.
– Michelangelo
There is no greater harm than that of time wasted.
– Michelangelo
What do you despise? By this you are truly known.
– Michelangelo
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.
– Michelangelo
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?
– Michelangelo
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
– Michelangelo
The stone unhewn and cold
Becomes a living mould,
The more the marble wastes
The more the statue grows.
– Michelangelo
If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.
– Michelangelo
Trifles go to make perfection,
And perfection is no trifle.
– Michelangelo
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.
– Michelangelo
The best of artists has no conception that the marble alone does not contain within itself.
– Michelangelo
I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.
– Michelangelo
Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come.
– Michelangelo