Quotes from Michelangelo Buonarroti

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.

AS YOU GIVE OUT SO SHALL YOU RECEIVE.

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?

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.

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.

If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.

Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.

No thought is born in me that does not bear the image of death.

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 depend.

Lord grant that I might always desire more than I can accomplish.

Trifles go to make perfection,And perfection is no trifle.

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 that the garment with which it is clothed

If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.

The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.

If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn't call it genius.

Genius is eternal patience.

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

Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I accomplish.

The greatest artist does not have any concept Which a single piece of marble does not itself contain Within its excess, though only A hand that obeys the intellect can discover it.

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

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.

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

Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.

Patience is eternal genius