Top 100 Michelangelo's Quotes
#1. Michelangelo was once asked how he would carve an elephant. He replied, I would take a large piece of stone and take away everything that was not the elephant.
Sharon Salzberg
#2. In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Yanko Tsvetkov
#3. I already have a wife who is too much for me.. she is my art, and my works are my children.
Michelangelo
#4. I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.
Michelangelo
#5. that) but because God thought the whole thing up first. Fran illustrates this with the Sistine Chapel in Rome, where Michelangelo portrays the creation of
William Edgar
#6. 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.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
#7. My work is like digging, it's archaeological research among the arid materials of our times. That's how I understand my first films, and that's what I'm still doing ...
Michelangelo Antonioni
#9. A good artist ought never to allow impatience to overcome his sense of the main end of art - perfection
Michelangelo
#10. The death of every art form seems imminent at least once in every century; but while the very funeral arrangements go forward, some child is born who is Michelangelo, Picasso, Yeats.
Reynolds Price
#11. The Creator made Italy from designs by Michelangelo.
Mark Twain
#12. You might say that I'm the Michelangelo of the dress business.
Oleg Cassini
#13. The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has.
Michelangelo
#15. You are the human clay," Vosch whispers fiercely in my ear. "And I am Michelangelo. I am the master builder, and you will be my masterpiece.
Rick Yancey
#16. The secret angels of God are only as alive as the marble angels of Michelangelo!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#17. You are the masterpiece
of your own life.
You are the Michelangelo
of your own life.
The David you are sculpturing
is you
(Dr. Joe Vitale)
Rhonda Byrne
#18. Ah, what balance is needed at the edges of such an abyss. I am left alone on the surface of a turning planet. What to do but, like Michelangelo 's Adam, put my hand out into unknown space, hoping for the reciprocating touch?
R.S. Thomas
#20. Communication has always been at the service of power. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel for the Pope. Is it not an advertisement for the Church? I try to make the best pictures I can and sometimes they are used in advertising campaigns.
Oliviero Toscani
#21. 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.
Michelangelo
#22. If God dislikes gays so much, how come he picked Michelangelo, a known homosexual, to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling while assigning Anita Bryant to go on television and push orange juice?
Mike Royko
#23. An artist must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye.
Michelangelo
#24. 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 Buonarroti
#26. Michelangelo indeed could have carved out your features.
Bob Dylan
#27. If we now seek the spiritual significance of the technique of Michelangelo we shall find that his sculpture expressed restless energy ...
Auguste Rodin
#28. Faith in oneself is the best and safest course.
Michelangelo
#29. With Michelangelo anatomical science is transformed into music. With him the human body is architectonic matter for the construction of dreams.
Umberto Boccioni
#30. Man is a marble piece; unlike Michelangelo's masterpieces, man is unconsciously carved and imperfectly shaped by the nature!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#31. Souls will never ascend to Heaven until the sight of beauty lifts them there.
Michelangelo
#32. 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.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
#33. I sometimes set myself thinking and imagining that I find amongst men but one single art or science, and that is drawing or painting, all others being members proceeding therefrom.
Michelangelo
#34. 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
#35. ...Michelangelo transformed both the practice of art and our conception of the artist's role in society.
Miles J. Unger
#37. I believe in a benevolent God not because He created the Grand Canyon or Michelangelo, but because He gave us snacks.
Paul Rudnick
#38. Only God creates. The rest of us just copy.
Michelangelo
#39. Sculpture is made by taking away, while painting is made by adding.
Michelangelo
#40. An artist does his most difficult work when he steps back from the blank canvas and thinks about what he is going to create.
Michelangelo
#41. We know that behind every image revealed there is another image more faithful to reality, and in the back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and so on, up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see.
Michelangelo Antonioni
#42. Even popularity can be overdone. In Rome, along at first, you are full of regrets that Michelangelo died; but by and by, you only regret that you didn't see him do it.
Mark Twain
#43. When Michelangelo was an old man, he drew himself sitting in a child's pushcart.
Kathe Kollwitz
#44. The best of artists hath no thought to show which the rough stone in its superfluous shell doth not include; to break the marble spell is all the hand that serves the brain can do.
Michelangelo
#45. I hate the word superstar". I have never been able to think in those terms. They are overstatements. You don't hear them speak of Shakespeare as a superpoet. You don't hear them call Michelangelo a superpainter. They only apply the word to this mundane market
James Cagney
#46. 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
#47. Art is the gift of God, and must be used unto His glory. That in art is highest which aims at this.
Michelangelo
#48. Michelangelo's contemporaries thought him the greatest artist who ever lived and called him 'divine.' His reputation as sculptor, architect, painter and draughtsman has not subsequently been surpassed, and who is to say his contemporaries were wrong?
Michael Ayrton
#49. I really loved Michelangelo. I've always been a little partial to Donatello to be honest, especially with the animated series. There's just something about Donnie that I really like. But, you know, Mikey's also Mikey. It's kind of just a given he's the most fun one.
Noel Fisher
#50. Michelangelo's girlfriend, who said to Angelo, Forget the paint - let's put a mirror on the ceiling. Never got a dinner!
Red Buttons
#51. It's a stage with four lights clamped to it with walls made out of plywood. And then my name's in the center. It's the type of thing that can be made over and over again. It's not like a Michelangelo sculpture.
Josh Smith
#52. I never photograph anything I don't believe in. If I love working with death, it's because even in death I find this power of reality that no sculptor or painter could recreate, not even a Michelangelo or a Da Vinci.
Joel-Peter Witkin
#53. When Michelangelo was introduced to Titian, he said ... that Titian's colouring and his style much pleased him, but that it was a pity that in Venice men did not learn to draw well from the beginning, and that those painters did not pursue a better method in their studies.
Giorgio Vasari
#54. The earliest complete Odyssey to have survived is from the late tenth century, now in Michelangelo's Laurentian Library in Florence,
Adam Nicolson
#55. The photographer in Blow-Up, who is not a philosopher, wants to see things closer up. But it so happens that, by enlarging too far, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Hence there's a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part the meaning of Blow-Up.
Michelangelo Antonioni
#56. One paints with one's head, not one's hand.
Michelangelo
#57. Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way.
Chuck Palahniuk
#58. It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?"
"Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.
Irving Stone
#59. Is it any wonder, since, when near the fire,
I was melted and burned, if now that it's extinguished
outside me, it besets and consumes me inside,
and bit by bit reduces me to ashes?
Michelangelo Buonarroti
#60. He was working that charm right now on the trainer who kneeled before him and touched his thigh as though it were the thigh of David, Michelangelo's glorious statue come to life right here on court.
A.G. Starling
#61. In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.
T. S. Eliot
#62. This is Michelangelo, and I think it's pretty fucked-up you don't even know which one is yours anymore. You've probably sent Raphael into a depression.
J. Lynn
#63. Probably, if we looked at Da Vinci or Michelangelo with care, we'd see a historical particularity that the work is not treated as having. It's certainly true of Shakespeare.
Cass Sunstein
#64. I loved flawed art. Michelangelo's statue of Lorenzo with its warped base that rose to accommodate his foot, the Mona Lisa's missing eyebrows. Flaws were seriously underrated. They were beautiful if you looked at them just so.
Tarryn Fisher
#65. The air in a man's lungs 10,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 atoms, so that sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breathed before by anyone you can think of who has ever lived - Michelangelo or George Washington or Moses.
Jacob Bronowski
#66. To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved into Michelangelo's David. Speech is what man pays homage to in every moment he can imagine.
Tom Wolfe
#67. Guido the plumber and Michelangelo obtained their marble from the same quarry, but what each saw in the marble made the difference between a nobleman's sink and a brilliant sculpture.
Rob Kall
#68. If you think beauty insipid, you haven't experienced it. Nor is it always devoid of suffering. That's something religious artists have always understood, Michelangelo, Chagall, and Van Gogh, Beethoven, C.S. Lewis, and all the writer's for whom beauty is a gift and a calling.
Kristen Heitzmann
#69. Michelangelo's cook was illiterate, so he drew her a shopping list--- which today is priceless.
Mitchell Symons
#70. Even Michelangelo on his deathbed thought he'd done nothing to ennoble art. He wanted to destroy his work-the Pieta! And this from the greatest artist who ever lived. Of course I am not comparing my work to Michelangelo's. But this eternal dissatisfaction of the artist is what I was talking about.
John Huston
#71. I think people talk too much; that's the truth of the matter. I do. I don't believe in words. People use too many words and usually wrongly. I am sure that in the distant future people will talk much less and in a more essential way. If people talk a lot less, they will be happier. Don't ask me why.
Michelangelo Antonioni
#72. In Hebrew, satan means an advocate of the alternative, the one who makes the arguments you don't know how to refute." Michelangelo looked to the old Jew, still grinning wickedly in the corner. "That satan is my best friend.
Adam Gidwitz
#73. Talent grips us. We are overtaken by the beauty of Michelangelo's sculpture, riveted by Mariah Carey's angelic voice, doubled over in laughter by the comedy of Robin Williams, and captivated by the on screen performances of Denzel Washington.
John C. Maxwell
#74. I saw the dance as a vision of ineffable power. A man could, with dignity and a towering majesty, dance. Not mince, cavort, do "fancy dancing" or "showoff" steps. No: Dance as Michelangelo's visions dance and as the music of Bach dances.
Jose Limon
#75. I couldn't give you something mediocre even if that's all you asked for.
Michelangelo
#76. 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
#77. My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth's loveliness.
Michelangelo
#78. 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.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
#80. You love a job, no matter how hard it is, it's still easy. Not sure, never studied up on the guy, could be wrong, but I reckon Michelangelo didn't wake up and think, 'Fuck , I gotta drag my ass outta bed. More painting at the Sistine Chapel. Wish that shit was done so I could get to a fuckin' beach.
Kristen Ashley
#81. That's another thing that pisses me off about that Michelangelo statue of me in Florence. He's got me standing there uncircumcised! Who the fuck did he think I was?
Joseph Heller
#82. I start to feel like an empty canvas under the hands of Michelangelo. No! Like a swimmer who's gone out to far in the ocean being pulled back to shore by a fashion lifeguard.
Alecia Whitaker
#83. Raffael's drapery is the assistant of character, in Michelangelo it envelopes grandeur; it is in Reubens the ponderous robe of pomp.
Henry Fuseli
#84. When Michelangelo finished the painting of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling, he spent the rest of his life trying to remove the paint that had poured into his sleeve.
Francois Cavanna
#85. 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
#86. To a recognizably Christian culture, like Shakespeare's, Jesus Christ is the Logos incarnate, the Word made flesh. He exemplifies the good of having a body. In the long run, that is why Aquinas could baptize Aristotle and why the West could produce Shakespeare and Michelangelo.
William Shakespeare
#87. So it is with Moslem women and their veils,' Michelangelo said. 'When they saw Muhammad's wives wearing veils, they sought to imitate them, and so now nearly all Islamic women wear veils even though there is no stipulation in their Holy Koran that they do so.
Matthew Reilly
#88. Every great artist raises art to a science, and every great scientist raises science to an art, hence we have Michelangelo's David and Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
Robert Breault
#89. 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 Buonarroti
#90. When I think of competition it's like I try to create against the past. I think about Michelangelo and Picasso, you know, the pyramids.
Kanye West
#91. There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#92. The moment always comes when, having collected one's ideas, certain images, an intuition of a certain kind of development- whether psychological or material- one must pass on to the actual realization.
Michelangelo Antonioni
#93. He was like warm marble wherever she touched him, solid and unyielding, Michelangelo's namesake sculpture come to life.
Tina Wright
#94. Michelangelo regarding this subject: "The greater danger is not that our hopes are too high and we fail to reach them, it's that they are too low, and we do.
Wayne W. Dyer
#95. I was inspired by [Michelangelo] Antonioni's Red Desert - very big and moody.
Lykke Li
#96. Atop a Ferris wheel, Orson Welles told Joseph Cotten how Italy's thirty years of war and terror and bloodshed had produced the Renaissance and Michelangelo, and how Switzerland's five hundred years of democracy and peace had produced, goddamn, only the cuckoo clock.
Kevin Wilson
#97. 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.
Michelangelo
#98. Michelangelo was asked by the pope about the secret of his genius, particularly how he carved the statue of David, largely considered the masterpiece of all masterpieces. His answer was: "It's simple. I just remove everything that is not David.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#99. Magnus believed that many old things were creations of enduring beauty. The pyramids. Michelangelo's David. Versailles. Magnus himself.
Cassandra Clare
#100. 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
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