163 Quotes by Irving Stone

Cardinal Giovanni still did not like delicate matters; they were usually painful.

When I compare myself to the other fellows there is something stiff and awkward about me; I look as if I had been in prison for ten years.

No excellent soul is exempt from mixture of madness

Lorenzo il Magnifico, the Plato Four, the humanists had taught him that man was the center of the universe; and this was never more demonstrable that when he stood looking upward and found himself, a lone individual, serving as the central pole holding up the tarpaulin of sun and clouds, moon and stars, knowing that, lone or abandoned as he might feel, without his support the heavens would fall.

Sometimes I think that just as trains and carriages are means of locomotion to get us from one place to another on this earth, so typhoid and consumption are means of locomotion to get us from one world to another.

He was spilling out a year of his life blood with every convulsive painting that he tore from his vitals. It was not the length of his stay on earth that mattered to him ; it was what he did with the days of his life. For him time would have to be measured by the paintings he poured out, not by the fluttering leaves of a calendar.

That was how his pen finally designed his sculpture; in the center the weak, confused, arrogant, soon to be destroyed young man holding cup a loft, behind him the idyllic child, clear-eyed, munching his grapes, symbol of joy; between them the tiger skin. The Bacchus, hollow within himself, flabby, reeling, already old; the Satyr, eternally young and gay, symbol of man’s childhood and naughty innocence

How could he have been so stupid, so blind? David pictured after Goliath could be no one but the biblical David, a special individual. He was not content to portray one man; he was seeking universal man, Everyman, all of whom,from the beginning of time, had faced a decision to strike for freedom

He turned, stood above the crowd gazing up at him. There was silence in the square. And yet he had never felt such complete communication. It was as though they read each other’s thoughts, as though they were one and the same: they were part of him,every Florentine standing below, eyes turned up to him, and he was a part of them.