180 Quotes by Michelangelo

The mind, the soul, becomes ennobled by the endeavour to create something perfect, for God is perfection, and whoever strives after perfection is striving for something devine.

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

The science of design, or of line-drawing, if you like to use this term, is the source and very essence of painting, sculpture, architecture... Sometimes... it seems to me that... all the works of the human brain and hand are either design itself or a branch of that art.

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

However rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man.

Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.

Do not be concerned that you might set a target too high and fail. Be concerned that you will set it too low and succeed.

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.

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.