Michelangelo
Trifles make perfection but perfection is not a trifleCollection: Perfection
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.Collection: Block
Genius is infinite painstaking.Collection: Creativity
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.Collection: Struggle
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.Collection: Death
The hand that follows intellect can achieve.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Looks
Love is a beautiful image Imagined or seen within the heart, The friend of virtue and gentility.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: 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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Falling In Love
Read the heart and not the letter for the pen cannot draw near the good intent.Collection: Inspiration
Led by long years to my last hours, too late, O world, I know your joys for what they are. You promise a peace which is not yours to give and the repose that dies before it is born. The years of fear and shame to which Heaven now set a term, renew nothing in me but the old sweet error in which, living overlong a man kills his soul with no gain to his body. I say and I know having put it to the proof, that he has the better part in Heaven whose death falls nearest his birth.Collection: Death
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.Collection: Artist
Souls will never ascend to Heaven until the sight of beauty lifts them there.Collection: Sight
With few words I shall make thee understand my soul.Collection: Inspiration
If people knew how hard I worked at my art, they would not consider me a genius.Collection: Art
True art is made noble and religious by the mind producing it.Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Appreciation
If the wine is not good, then throw it out!Collection: Wine
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.Collection: Inspiration
Poets and painters have the power to dare, I mean to dare to do whatever they may approve of.Collection: Mean
Let whoever may have attained to so much as to have the power of drawing know that he holds a great treasure.Collection: Art
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 dependCollection: Wise
Draw, Antonio; draw, Antonio; draw and don’t waste time.Collection: Inspiration
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.Collection: Love
One paints with one's head, not one's hand.Collection: Hands
However rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man.Collection: Men
Nature did all things wellCollection: Nature
And still I am learning.Collection: Stills
It is better decoration when, in painting, some monstrosity is introduced for variety and a relaxation of the senses and to attract the attention of mortal eyes, which at times desire to see that which they have never seen.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Color
The power of one fair face makes my love sublime, for it has weaned my heart from low desires.Collection: Heart
I give my soul to God, my body to the earth, and my worldly possessions to my nearest of kin, charging them to remember the sufferings of Jesus Christ.Collection: Jesus
No thought is born in me that does not bear the image of death.Collection: Inspiration
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.Collection: Beauty
There is an angel imprisoned in it and I must set it free.Collection: Angel
No one has mastery, Before he is at the end, Of his art and his life.Collection: Art
Serene I fold my hands and wait.Collection: Hands
Can't you see the angel imprisoned in the block of stone trying to get out? I am trying to free himCollection: Block
The goods of Fortune, even such as they really are, still need taste to enjoy them. It is the enjoying no the possessing, that makes us happy.Collection: Character
So now, from this mad passion Which made me take art for an idol and a king I have learnt the burden of error that it bore And what misfortune springs from man's desire... The world's frivolities have robbed me of the time That I was given for reflecting upon God.Collection: Art
The great tragedy of life is not that people set their sights too high and fail to achieve their goals but that they set their sights too low and do.Collection: Sight
I was never the kind of painter or sculptor who kept a shop.Collection: Kind
I feast on wine and bread, and feasts they are.Collection: Wine
Perchance that I might learn what pity is, That I might laugh at erring men no more.Collection: Men
A good sculpture can be rolled downhill without breaking.Collection: Sculpture