Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, known best as simply Michelangelo, was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance born in the Republic of Florence, who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. This Michelangelo quotes will motivate you.
Best Michelangelo Quotes
- “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
- “Your gifts lie in the place where your values, passions, and strengths meet. Discovering that place is the first step toward sculpting your masterpiece, Your Life.” ~ Michelangelo
- “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” ~ Michelangelo
- “Perfection is no small thing, but it is made up of small things.” ~ Michelangelo
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“Only God creates. The rest of us just copy.” ~ Michelangelo
- “I created a vision of David in my mind and simply carved away everything that was not David.” ~ Michelangelo
- “To know each other is the best way to understand each other. To understand each other is the only way to love each other.” ~ Michelangelo
- “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.” ~ Michelangelo
- “If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.” ~ Michelangelo
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“The idea is there locked inside. All you have to do is remove the excess stone.” ~ Michelangelo
- “No great work of art is ever finished.” ~ Michelangelo
- “For those who feel it, nothing makes the soul so religious and pure as the endeavor to create something perfect; for God is perfection, and whoever strives after it, is striving after something divine. True painting is only the image of the perfection of God, a shadow of the pencil with which he paints, a melody, a striving after harmony.” ~ Michelangelo
- “Do not fret, for God did not create us to abandon us.” ~ Michelangelo
- “Your greatness is measured by your horizons.” ~ Michelangelo
- “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.” ~ Michelangelo
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“There is no greater harm than that of time wasted.” ~ Michelangelo
- “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” ~ Michelangelo
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “He who follows another will never overtake him” ~ Michelangelo
- “My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth’s loveliness.” ~ Michelangelo
- “Genius is eternal patience.” ~ Michelangelo
- “A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.” ~ Michelangelo
- “Lord free me of myself, so I can please you!” ~ Michelangelo
- “Gazing on beautiful things acts on my soul.” ~ Michelangelo
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“Art lives on constraint and dies of freedom.” ~ Michelangelo
- “If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn’t call it genius.” ~ Michelangelo
- “A good artist ought never to allow impatience to overcome his sense of the main end of art – perfection” ~ Michelangelo
- “Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.” ~ Michelangelo
- “Love is a beautiful image Imagined or seen within the heart, The friend of virtue and gentility.” ~ Michelangelo
- “Critique by creating.” ~ Michelangelo
- “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
- “If we have been pleased with life, we should not be displeased with death, since it comes from the hand of the same master.” ~ Michelangelo
- “Do you know that women who are chaste remain much fresher than those who are not?” ~ Michelangelo
- “Art is a jealous thing; it requires the whole and entire man.” ~ Michelangelo Quotes
- “Beauty depends on purpose. It is in the elements best suited to their purpose or aim that beauty shines forth most strongly.” ~ Michelangelo
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“Genius is infinite painstaking.” ~ Michelangelo
- “I am still learning. (at age 87)” ~ Michelangelo
- “Lord, make me see thy glory in every place.” ~ Michelangelo
- “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
- “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.” ~ Michelangelo
- “An artist must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye.” ~ Michelangelo
- “Sculpture is made by taking away, while painting is made by adding.” ~ Michelangelo
- “I criticize by creation, not by finding fault.” ~ Michelangelo
