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. 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

#4. 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

#5. The Creator made Italy from designs by Michelangelo.

Mark Twain

#6. You might say that I'm the Michelangelo of the dress business.

Oleg Cassini

#7. 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

#8. The secret angels of God are only as alive as the marble angels of Michelangelo!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. Michelangelo indeed could have carved out your features.

Bob Dylan

#15. If we now seek the spiritual significance of the technique of Michelangelo we shall find that his sculpture expressed restless energy ...

Auguste Rodin

#16. With Michelangelo anatomical science is transformed into music. With him the human body is architectonic matter for the construction of dreams.

Umberto Boccioni

#17. Man is a marble piece; unlike Michelangelo's masterpieces, man is unconsciously carved and imperfectly shaped by the nature!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#18. ...Michelangelo transformed both the practice of art and our conception of the artist's role in society.

Miles J. Unger

#19. I believe in a benevolent God not because He created the Grand Canyon or Michelangelo, but because He gave us snacks.

Paul Rudnick

#20. 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

#21. When Michelangelo was an old man, he drew himself sitting in a child's pushcart.

Kathe Kollwitz

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. If something becomes old-fashioned, it was no good to start with. Think about it. Michelangelo is not old-fashioned.

David Bailey

#26. 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

#27. Michelangelo's girlfriend, who said to Angelo, Forget the paint - let's put a mirror on the ceiling. Never got a dinner!

Red Buttons

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. The earliest complete Odyssey to have survived is from the late tenth century, now in Michelangelo's Laurentian Library in Florence,

Adam Nicolson

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. You are the Michelangelo of your own life. The David you are sculpting is you.

Joe Vitale

#41. It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?"
"Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.

Irving Stone

#42. 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

#43. In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.

T. S. Eliot

#44. 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

#45. I was raised to be a girl Michelangelo.

Carolyn Kizer

#46. Michelangelo was not only widely famous during his lifetime, but actually wealthy as a result of producing art (he was the first Westerner to have a biography of his life published while he was living).

David D. Peck

#47. Just because we are not Italian, does not mean we cannot appreciate Michelangelo, it is the same with cuisine.

Anthony Bourdain

#48. You no longer feel the fear of a change of being and desire ... The course of the hours lays not violent hands upon you ; necessity and chance guide not your steps ... I can hardly write without envy.
Michelangelo on the dead.

Michelangelo Buonarroti

#49. I always want to do music that inspires or influences another generation. You want what you create to live, be it sculpture or painting or music. Like Michelangelo, he said, I know the creator will go, but his work survives. That is why to escape death, I attempt to bind my soul to my work.

Michael Jackson

#50. driven, passionate, mercurial, irascible" [the character of Michelangelo]

Miles J. Unger

#51. (Never mind that the assistants were likely interchangeable, while Michelangelo was not.)

Susan Cain

#52. I'm glad ... that Edison didn't give up on the light bulb. That Luther refused to back down. That Michelangelo kept painting. That Lindbergh kept flying.

Charles R. Swindoll

#53. Michelangelo is a constructor, and Rafael an artist who, great as he is, is always limited by the model. When he tries to be thoughtful he falls below the niveau of his great rival.

Paul Cezanne

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. Sure. Through the windshield, Dan could see the Cowboy Boot patrons come and go, probably not talking of Michelangelo.

Stephen King

#58. Do you know about the Turtle?" She said turtle in a way that made it sound like a proper noun. I thought of saying I know about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and didn't. It was decades too early for Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo. So I just shook my head. She

Stephen King

#59. If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.

Andrew Denton

#60. Few have heard of Fra Luca Pacioli, the inventor of double-entry bookkeeping; but he has probably had much more influence on human life than has Dante or Michelangelo.

Herbert J. Muller

#61. 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

#62. Pandora, meet my brothers, Leonardo and Michelangelo."
"Like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?" she couldn't resist asking.
"Like the Renaissance painters," Leo snapped. He exchanged a snarl with his twin brother. "I seriously hate those damned turtles.

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#63. Bleed me of art, and there won't be enough liquid left in me to spit! [Michelangelo Buonorotti]

Irving Stone

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. Michelangelo's cook was illiterate, so he drew her a shopping list--- which today is priceless.

Mitchell Symons

#67. We are not just Art for Michelangelo to carve, he can't rewrite the agro of my furied heart- Lady Gaga 10/22/10

Lady Gaga

#68. What doesn't kill us sharpens us. Hardens us. Schools us. You're beating plowshares into swords, Vosch. You are remaking us. We are the clay, and you are Michelangelo. And we will be your masterpiece.

Rick Yancey

#69. Tintoretto attempted to fill the line of Michelangelo with color, without tracing its principle.

Henry Fuseli

#70. Put yourself in the position of an up-and-coming artist living in early-sixteenth-century Italy. Now imagine trying to distinguish yourself from the other artists living in your town: Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, or Titian. Is it any wonder that the Italian High Renaissance lasted only 30 years?

Jerry Saltz

#71. Even at this ridiculous hour, and clad in a faded blue t-shirt and ancient pyjama pants, he looked like something Michelangelo might reject for being too beautiful

Tabitha McGowan

#72. 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

#73. Picasso, Michelangelo, possibly, might be verging on genius, but I don't think a painter like Rembrandt is a genius.

Damien Hirst

#74. 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

#75. Although 'to paint' means something like "to cause to be covered with paint," one does not 'paint a brush' when one dips it in the can, and it is hard to say with a straight face that "Michelangelo painted the ceiling" when he caused the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to be covered with paint.

Steven Pinker

#76. Even Michelangelo got paid for doing the Sistine Chapel. To those artists who say they're doing it for the love of art, I say: Get real.

Gianni Versace

#77. When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.

Madeleine L'Engle

#78. 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

#79. There are people that I am in love with, totally in love with them. I would die for them. I love Michelangelo. I love Charlie Chaplin with all my heart. I love Walt Disney. These are the people I am nuts over. These are my people. I love the great ones.

Michael Jackson

#80. I was born to play football, just like Beethoven was born to write music and Michelangelo was born to paint.

Pele

#81. Larry said that Michelangelo was a poof, so I wondered why he'd sculpted a guy with a really tiny cock. But I know when you go to old houses, the doorways are much smaller, 'cause people were shorter then, so maybe cocks were smaller too. It makes me glad I wasn't born a few centuries ago.

J.L. Merrow

#82. 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

#83. Florence is perhaps best known for being the seat of Renaissance art, and rightly so: A greatest-hits collection of artists passed through its streets - Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, and Brunelleschi among them.

Hanya Yanagihara

#84. In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color.

Edvard Munch

#85. If a person sweeps streets for a living, he should sweep them as Michelangelo painted, as Beethoven composed, as Shakespear wrote.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#86. Michelangelo once said, "If the people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem wonderful at all." His

Gary Keller

#87. You look at Vladimir Radmanovic, this guy is cut from stone. As if Michelangelo was reading and a lightening bolt flashed before him.

Bill Walton

#88. With a stroke of love on the canvas of my soul I'm painting a perfect world with shades of Michelangelo With each promise made in every heart that knows we can live in a perfect world in shades of Michelangelo I hear songs of children echo in the sky I hear songs of children a tomorrow so bright!

Belinda Carlisle

#89. It would be very tempting to say that why paint because we have Michelangelo, we have Leonardo [Da Vinci], we have all these guys. Why waste your time, because most likely you're not going to be on that level anyway.

Esa-Pekka Salonen

#90. What do we teach our children? ... We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique ... You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything.

Pablo Casals

#91. I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.

George Bernard Shaw

#92. I am highly susceptible to the force of all truly religious music, especially to the music of my own church, the church of Shelley, Michelangelo, and Beethoven.

George Bernard Shaw

#93. I'd be looking at some stony sculpture Michelangelo would have killed his grandmother to be able to do, and thinking, I don't know that color, that color doesn't exist, but like wow.

Robin McKinley

#94. If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.

Uzo Aduba

#95. 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

#96. I'd like to speak a foreign language well enough to get the jokes. I'd like to talk with Socrates, and watch Michelangelo sculpt David. I'd like to see the world as it was a million years ago and a million years hence.

Robert Fulghum

#97. Socrates became a trendsetter. Other philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle and Gus, quickly followed suit, dropping their last names too. And, for centuries after that there would be countless imitators including oltaire, Michelangelo, and, much later, Cher.

Demetri Martin

#98. 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

#99. Someone once asked Michelangelo how he was able to create the amazing statue of David. He replied, "I didn't create David. He was there all along, in that massive block of marble. I just had to chip away to find him.

Lori Nelson Spielman

#100. The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." - Michelangelo

Tim Fargo