Michelangelo Quotes - Page 6

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• It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand.

  Michelangelo

  Artist, Hands, Sculpture

  11 Copy quote

• Love lent me wings; my path was like a stair;
  A lamp unto my feet, that sun was given;
  And death was safety and great joy to find;
  But dying now, I shall not climb to Heaven.

  Michelangelo

  Wings, Feet, Safety

  Michelangelo Buonarroti, Tommaso Campanella (1878). “The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti and Tommaso Campanella”

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• 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

  Men, Years, Four

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• 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

  Artist, Evil, Heaven

  16 Copy quote

• If I love in thee, beloved, only what thou lovest most, do not be angry; for so one spirit is enamoured of another.

  Michelangelo

  Love, Spirit, Thee

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• Painting and sculpture, labour and good faith, have been my ruin and I continually go from bad to worse. Better it would have been for me if I had set myself to making matches in my youth. I should not be in such distress of mind.

  Michelangelo

  Stress, Mind, Sculpture

  11 Copy quote

• I cannot live under pressures from patrons, let alone paint.

  Michelangelo

  Pressure, Paint, Under Pressure

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Country, Nurse, Atmosphere

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Artist, Hands, Sculpture

  16 Copy quote

• It is therefore indisputable that the limbs of architecture are derived from the limbs of man.

  Michelangelo

  Badass, Bad Ass, Men

  Michelangelo Buonarroti, E. H. Ramsden (1963). “The Letters of Michelangelo”, p.129, Stanford University Press

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• 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

  Pain, Inspiration, Sleep

  Michelangelo (2017). “Sonnets of Michelangelo”, p.78, Routledge

  4 Copy quote

• Lorenzo de' Medici seeks highly skilled, aesthetically oriented individual to conceive and implement several major public projects. You are a generalist with sound training in structural engineering, synthesis of pigments and Christian iconography. Some climbing involved

  Michelangelo

  Christian, Climbing, Engineering

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• In my opinion painting should be considered excellent in proportion as it approaches the effect of relief, while relief should be considered bad in proportion as it approaches the effect of painting.

  Michelangelo

  Relief, Opinion, Painting

  Quoted in Robert J Clements (ed) Michelangelo: A Self-Portrait (1968).

  7 Copy quote

• There is no tongue to speak his eulogy;
  Too brightly burned his splendour for our eyes:
  Far easier to condemn his injurers,
  Than for the tongue to reach his smallest worth.
  He to the realms of sinfulness came down,
  To teach mankind; ascending then to God,
  Heaven unbarred to him her lofty gates,
  To whom his country hers refused to ope.
  Ungrateful land, to its own injury
  Nurse of his fate! Well too does this instruct,
  That greatest ills fall to the perfectest.
  And 'midst a thousand proofs, let this suffice,
  That, as his exile had no parallel,
  So never was there man more great than he.

  Michelangelo

  Country, Fall, Eye

  "Michael Angelo, considered as a philosophic poet".

  9 Copy quote

• A great sculpture can roll down a hill without breaking.

  Michelangelo

  Art, Sculpture, Hills

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• From such a gentle thing, from such a fountain of all delight, my every pain is born.

  Michelangelo

  Pain, Inspiration, Delight

  Michelangelo Buonarroti (1960). “The Complete Poems of Michelangelo”

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• Whenever a great painter... does a work which appears to be false and lying, that falsity is very true.

  Michelangelo

  Lying, Doe, Very True

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• 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

  Inspiration, Fire, Ashes

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Men, Thinking

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• As when, O lady mine, With chiselled touch, The stone unhewn and cold, Becomes a living mould, The more the marble wastes, The more the statue grows.

  Michelangelo

  Inspiration, Sculpture, Stones

  Michelangelo's sonnet addressed to Vittoria Colonna as quoted in Mrs. Henry Roscoe "Vittoria Colonna: Her Life and Poems" (p. 169), 1868.

  7 Copy quote

• The greatest artist has no conception which a single block of white marble does not potentially contain within its mass, but only a hand obedient to the mind can penetrate to this image.

  Michelangelo

  Block, Artist, Hands

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• My beard towards heaven, I feel my nape support / The back of my head, I grow the breast of a harpy / And my brush as it drips continually / Upon my face, makes it a gorgeous floor.

  Michelangelo

  Support, Heaven, Beard

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• 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

  Artist, Hands, Brain

  John Addington Symonds, Michelangelo Buonarroti (2002). “The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti: Based on Studies in the Archives of the Buonarroti Family at Florence”, p.110, University of Pennsylvania Press

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