Top 100 Quotes About Michelangelo
#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. Michelangelo continually had trouble with his assistants and had to sack several for poor workmanship, laziness, or even - in one particular case - because the lad in question was 'a stuck-up little turd'.
Alexander Lee
#50. The power of one fair face makes my love sublime, for it has weaned my heart from low desires.
Michelangelo
#51. If something becomes old-fashioned, it was no good to start with. Think about it. Michelangelo is not old-fashioned.
David Bailey
#52. Till now I have never shot a scene without taking account of what stands behind the actors because the relationship between people and their surroundings is of prime importance.
Michelangelo Antonioni
#53. 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
#54. 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.
Michelangelo
#55. A director is a man, therefore he has ideas; he is also an artist, therefore he has imagination. Whether they are good or bad, it seems to me that I have an abundance of stories to tell. And the things I see, the things that happen to me, continually renew the supply.
Michelangelo Antonioni
#56. Michelangelo's girlfriend, who said to Angelo, Forget the paint - let's put a mirror on the ceiling. Never got a dinner!
Red Buttons
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to hear and see it.
Michelangelo
#60. The impact of the acute angle of a triangle on a circle is actually as overwhelming in effect as the finger of God touching the finger of Adam in Michelangelo.
Wassily Kandinsky
#61. I began taking liberties a long time ago; now it is standard practice for most directors to ignore the rules.
Michelangelo Antonioni
#62. 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.
Michelangelo
#63. I always mistrust everything I see, which an image shows me, because I imagine what is beyond it. And what is beyond an image cannot be known.
Michelangelo Antonioni
#64. But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.
Umberto Eco
#65. Don't listen to those who say, you taking too big a chance. Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor, and it would surely be rubbed out by today.
Neil Simon
#66. 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
#67. The earliest complete Odyssey to have survived is from the late tenth century, now in Michelangelo's Laurentian Library in Florence,
Adam Nicolson
#71. 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
#72. From such a gentle thing,from such a fountain of all delight,my every pain is born ...
Michelangelo Buonarroti
#73. One paints with one's head, not one's hand.
Michelangelo
#74. Leonardo da Vinci was homosexual, so was Michelangelo, Socrates, Shakespeare, and almost every other figure that has formed what we have come to understand as beauty.
Reinaldo Arenas
#77. Love is a beautiful image Imagined or seen within the heart, The friend of virtue and gentility.
Michelangelo
#78. 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.
Michelangelo
#79. 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.
Michelangelo
#81. True art is made noble and religious by the mind producing it.
Michelangelo
#82. words, literature, are not in the consciousness of the person who writes but in his fingers and the paper and the typewriter, just like the statues of Michelangelo were in the block of marble where they were revealed.
Antonio Munoz Molina
#83. When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them.
Michelangelo Antonioni
#85. Michelangelo didn't show David triumphant, the way every other sculptor did. He showed David before he fought Goliath - when David believed he was doomed and went into battle anyway.
James Patterson
#86. 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
#87. You want to become aware of your thoughts, you want to choose your thoughts carefully and you want to have fun with this, because you are the masterpiece of your own life. You are the Michelangelo of your own life. The David that you are sculpting is you. And you do it with your thoughts.
Joe Vitale
#88. If there is some good in me, it is because I was born in the subtle atmosphere of your country of Arezzo. Along with the milk of my nurse I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer, with which I make my figures.
Michelangelo
#89. If the wine is not good, then throw it out!
Michelangelo
#90. You are the Michelangelo of your own life. The David you are sculpting is you.
Joe Vitale
#91. 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
#92. It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?"
"Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.
Irving Stone
#93. Beauty depends on purpose. It is in the elements best suited to their purpose or aim that beauty shines forth most strongly.
Michelangelo
#94. Poets and painters have the power to dare, I mean to dare to do whatever they may approve of ...
Michelangelo
#95. Art is a jealous thing; it requires the whole and entire man.
Michelangelo
#96. 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
#97. the fact remains that it is the fight itself, standing up against the hate because we dare to demand equality, that changes the culture and brings people to the cause.
Michelangelo Signorile
