Michelangelo Art Quotations

The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.

I live and love in God's peculiar light.

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.

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.

Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.

If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to hear and see it.

Faith in oneself is the best and safest course.

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.

A good artist ought never to allow impatience to overcome his sense of the main end of art - perfection

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.

True art is made noble and religious by the mind producing it.

No great work of art is ever finished.

Art is a shadow of Divine perfection.

Art is a jealous thing; it requires the whole and entire man.

Art is the gift of God, and must be used unto His glory. That in art is highest which aims at this.

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.

A great sculpture can roll down a hill without breaking.

If people knew how hard I worked at my art, they would not consider me a genius.

Art lives on constraint and dies of freedom.

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.

No one has mastery, Before he is at the end, Of his art and his life.

Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.

In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.

I already have a wife who is too much for me.. she is my art, and my works are my children.

Genius is eternal patience.