These statue quotes will inspire you. A statue is a free-standing sculpture in which the realistic, full-length figures of persons or animals or non-representational forms are carved or cast in a durable material such as wood, metal, or stone.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging statue quotes, statue sayings, and statue proverbs.
Best Statue Quotes
- “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” ~ Michelangelo.
- “Into the statue that breathes, the soul of the sculptor is bidden.” ~ Richard Realf
- “Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.” ~ Jean Cocteau
- “One day you’re the statue. One day you’re the pigeon.” ~ Diane Sawyer
-
“A garden without its statue is like a sentence without its verb.” ~ Joseph Beach
- “It does not matter whether one paints a picture, writes a poem, or carves a statue – simplicity is the mark of a master-hand.” ~ Elsie de Wolfe
- “The more the marble wastes,
The more the statue grows.” ~ Michelangelo - “Inanimate objects sometimes appear endowed with a strange power of sight. A statue notices, a tower watches, the face of an edifice contemplates.” ~ Victor Hugo
- “A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue.” ~ W. H. Auden
-
“I just think perfection and lasting through the ages is for Greek statues, not us mere humans.” ~ Mary E. Pearson
- “There is a statue of limitation.” ~ Samuel Goldwyn
- “I think statues are great; they show what great people would look like if a bird sh*t all over them.” ~ Demetri Martin
- “There are many statues of men slaying lions, but if only the lions were sculptors there might be quite a different set of statues.” ~ Aesop
- “A statue in a garden is to be considered as one part of a scene or landscape.” ~ William Shenstone
-
“No one ever erected a statue of a critic.” ~ Jean Sibelius
- “I had rather men should ask why my statue is not set up, than why it is.” ~ Plutarch
- “Imagine painting all the statues in the world in the color of the sky” ~ Yoko Ono
- “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
- “All in their lifetime carve their own soul’s statue.” ~ Thomas Buchanan Read , Life statue quotes
-
“Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.” ~ Denis Diderot
- “I say that the art of sculpture is eight times as great as any other art based on drawing, because a statue has eight views and they must all be equally good.” ~ Benvenuto Cellini
- “Yes, the highest things are beyond words. That is probably why all art aspires to the condition of wordlessness. When literature works on you, it does so in silence, in your dreams, in your wordless moments. Good words enter you and become moods, become the quiet fabric of your being. Like music, like painting, literature too wants to transcend its primary condition and become something higher. Art wants to move into silence, into the emotional and spiritual conditions of the world. Statues become melodies, melodies become yearnings, yearnings become actions.” ~ Ben Okri
- “As in Rome there is, apart from the Romans, a population of statues, so apart from this real world there is a world of illusion, almost more potent, in which most men live.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- “The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature – translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive.” ~ Hans Hofmann
-
“You have to accept the fact that sometimes you are the pigeon, and sometimes you are the statue.” ~ Claude Chabrol
- “Altars should face the east, and should always be placed on a lower level than are the statues in the temples, so that those who are praying and sacrificing may look upwards towards the divinity.” ~ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
- “Pay no attention to what the critics say;
no statue has ever been erected to a critic.” ~ Jean Sibelius - “I can’t imagine what it is like to be raised in a society where their only statues that exist are to you and your father.” ~ Madeleine Albright
- “The Statue of Liberty is no longer saying, ‘Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses.’ She’s got a baseball bat and yelling, ‘You want a piece of me?'” ~ Robin Williams
-
“I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums.” ~ Steven Wright
- “He who is continually changing his point of view sees more, and more clearly, than one who, statue-like, forever stands upon the same pedestal; however lofty and well-placed that pedestal may be.” ~ Arthur Helps
- “We build statues out of snow, and weep to see them melt.” ~ Walter Scott
- “How can the mind be so imperfect?” she says with a smile. I look at my hands. Bathed in the moonlight, they seem like statues, proportioned to no purpose. “It may well be imperfect,” I say, “but it leaves traces. And we can follow those traces, like footsteps in the snow.” “Where do the lead?” “To oneself,” I answer. “That’s where the mind is. Without the mind, nothing leads anywhere.” I look up. The winter moon is brilliant, over the Town, above the Wall. “Not one thing is your fault,” I comfort her.” ~ Haruki Murakami
- “Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that’s their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small.” ~ Carl Sagan
-
“A fixed idea is like the iron rod which sculptors put in their statues. It impales and sustains.” ~ Hippolyte Taine
- “When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother’s hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die.” ~ Randall Jarrell , God statue quotes
- “… knowledge must continually be renewed by ceaseless effort if it is not to be lost. It resembles a statue of marble which stands in the desert and is continually threatened with burial by the shifting sand. The hands of service must ever be at work, in order that the marble continue to lastingly shine in the sun. To these serving hands mine shall also belong.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “The Statue of Liberty means everything. We take it for granted today. We take it for granted. Remember the Statue of Liberty stands for what America is. We as Democrats have to remind ourselves and remind the country the great principles we stand for. This is a place of protection. This is not a country of bullies. We are not an empire. We are the light. We are the Statue of Liberty.” ~ Jerry Springer
- “Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.” ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
-
“When the wise man opens his mouth, the beauties of his soul present themselves to the view, like the statues in a temple.” ~ Pythagoras
- “Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral: a thing as simple and specious as a statue to the first glance, and yet on examination, as lively and interesting as a forest in detail.” ~ Robert Louis Stevenson
- “I am just…wondering, where is the glow of yesteryear? I’m wondering where the heroes went. Gosh, I don’t know how long ago they left. Heroes are not giant statues framed against a red sky. They are people who say: This is my community, and it is my responsibility to make it better. Interweave all these communities, and you really have an America that is back on its feet, a comfortable nation to live in again. I really think we’re gonna have to reassess what constitutes a hero.” ~ Tom McCall
- “The idea of beauty which man creates for himself imprints itself on his whole attire, crumples or stiffens his dress, rounds off or squares his gesture, and in the long run even ends by subtly penetrating the very features of his face. Man ends by looking like his ideal self. These engravings can be translated either into beauty or ugliness; in one direction, they become caricatures, in the other, antique statues.” ~ Charles Baudelaire
- “The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
-
“There’s a reason why in New York Harbor we have the Statue of Liberty, not the Statue of Equality.” ~ Charles Krauthammer
- “United States: the country where liberty is a statue.” ~ Nicanor Parra
- “Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings. You language where all language ends. You time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
- “The Marquis sighed. “I thought it was just a legend,” he said. “Like the alligators in the sewers of New York City.” Old Bailey nodded, sagely: “What, the big white buggers? They’re down there. I had a friend lost a head to one of them.” A moment of silence. Old Naeiley handed the statue back to the Marquis. Then he raised his hand, and snapped it, like a crocodile hand, at the Carabas. “It was OK,” gurned Old Bailey with a grin that was most terrible to behold. “He had another.” ~ Neil Gaiman
- “Maybe in the morning, sunlight would to turn him back into a statue; then I could take Stone out to the forest where he could frolic among the ferns, gurgle at streams, and make friends with the other interesting rocks.” ~ Devon Monk
-
“Many have lived on a pedestal who will never have a statue when dead.” ~ Pierre-Jean de Beranger
- “…It looked very different from the Statue of Liberty, but what did that matter? What was the good of having the statue without the liberty, the freedom to go where one chose if one was held back by one’s color? No, I preferred the Eiffel Tower, which made no promises.” ~ Josephine Baker, once she had seen the Eiffel Tower” ~ Josephine Baker
- “The snow drifted down and down, all in ghostly silence, and lay thick and unbroken on the ground. It was a place of whites and blacks and greys. White towers and white snow and white statues, black shadows and black trees, the dark grey sky above. A pure world, Sansa thought. I do not belong here. Yet she stepped out all the same.” ~ George R. R. Martin
- “What deep and worthy love is so, whether of woman or child, or art or music. Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.” ~ George Eliot
- “Like students of art who walk around a great statue, seeing parts and aspects of it from each position, but never the whole, we must walk mentally around time, using a variety of approaches, a pandemonium of metaphor.” ~ Robert Grudin
-
“Up there with my awards, I have a great big statue of Groucho Marx, just to put everything in perspective.” ~ John Lithgow
- “It seems strange to me that someone thought of making marble statues.” ~ Pablo Picasso
- “There’s no hall of fame for that working class hero, no statue carved out of stone. And his greatest reward is the love of a woman and his children.” ~ Alan Jackson
- “Ayn Rand held that art is a ‘re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgements.’ By its nature, therefore, a novel (like a statue or a symphony) does not require or tolerate an explanatory preface; it is a self-contained universe, aloof from commentary, beckoning the reader to enter, perceive, respond.” ~ Leonard Peikoff
- “I sing your restless longing for the statue, your fear of the feelings that await you in the street. I sing the small sea siren who sings to you, riding her bicycle of corals and conches. But above all I sing a common thought that joins us in the dark and golden hours. The light that blinds our eyes is not art. Rather it is love, friendship, crossed swords.” ~ Federico Garcia Lorca
-
“The last time I was inside a woman was when I went to the Statue of Liberty.” ~ Woody Allen
- “We all know that men in moderate circumstances can have just as comfortable houses as the richest, just as comfortable clothing, just as good food. They can see just as fine paintings, just as marvelous statues, and they can hear just as good music. They can attend the same theaters and the same operas. They can enjoy the same sunshine, and above all, can love and be loved just as well as kings and millionaires.” ~ Robert Green Ingersoll
- “These ceremonies and the National Statuary Hall will teach the youth of the land in succeeding generations as they come and go that the chief end of human effort in a sublunary view should be usefulness to mankind and that all true fame which should be perpetuated by public pictures, statues, and monuments, is to be acquired only by noble deeds and high achievements and the establishment of a character founded upon the principles of truth, uprightness, and inflexible integrity.” ~ Alexander H. Stephens
- “In times to resist, do not step aside; stay solid like a statue! In times to step aside, do not resist; be flexible like a snake!” ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan
- “Nothing can take the sting out of the world’s economic problems like watching millionaires present each other with golden statues.” ~ Billy Crystal
- “A man were better relate himself to a statue or picture than to suffer his thoughts to pass in smother.” ~ Francis Bacon
