Top 120 Michelangelo Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I am still learning.”

— Michelangelo

2. “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

3. “Genius is eternal patience. ”

— Michelangelo

Featured in: Patience Quotes

4. “If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.”

— Michelangelo

5. “If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn’t call it genius. ”

— Michelangelo

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

— Michelangelo

7. “Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I accomplish.”

— Michelangelo

8. “Read the heart and not the letter for the pen cannot draw near the good intent.”

— Michelangelo

9. “Only God creates. The rest of us just copy.”

— Michelangelo

10. “I created a vision of David in my mind and simply carved away everything that was not David.”

— Michelangelo

11. “To touch is to give life.”

— Michelangelo

12. “Your greatness is measured by your horizons.”

— Michelangelo

13. “Perfection is no small thing, but it is made up of small things.”

— Michelangelo

14. “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

— Michelangelo

15. “Draw, Antonio; draw, Antonio; draw and don’t waste time.”

— Michelangelo

16. “Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.”

— Michelangelo

Featured in: Perfection Quotes

17. “The idea is there locked inside. All you have to do is remove the excess stone.”

— Michelangelo

18. “There is no greater harm than that of time wasted.”

— Michelangelo

Featured in: Artist Quotes

19. “I couldn’t give you something mediocre even if that’s all you asked for.”

— Michelangelo

20. “Gazing on beautiful things acts on my soul.”

— Michelangelo

21. “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

— Michelangelo

22. “Lord free me of myself, so I can please you!”

— Michelangelo

23. “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

24. “No one has mastery, Before he is at the end, Of his art and his life.”

— Michelangelo

25. “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

26. “The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.”

— Michelangelo

27. “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

28. “The great tragedy of life is not that people set their sights too high and fail to achieve their goals but that they set their sights too low and do.”

— Michelangelo

29. “As you give out, so shall you receive.”

— Michelangelo

30. “No great work of art is ever finished.”

— Michelangelo

31. “He who follows another will never overtake him.”

— Michelangelo

32. “Critique by creating.”

— Michelangelo

33. “Do not fret, for God did not create us to abandon us.”

— Michelangelo

34. “An artist must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye.”

— Michelangelo

35. “Art is a jealous thing; it requires the whole and entire man.”

— Michelangelo

36. “Souls will never ascend to Heaven until the sight of beauty lifts them there.”

— Michelangelo

37. “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.”

— Michelangelo

38. “Many believe – and I believe – that I have been designated for this work by God. In spite of my old age, I do not want to give it up; I work out of love for God and I put all my hope in Him.”

— Michelangelo

39. “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

40. “Art lives on constraint and dies of freedom.”

— Michelangelo

41. “A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.”

— Michelangelo

42. “Death and love are the two wings that bear the good man to heaven.”

— Michelangelo

43. “A great sculpture can roll down a hill without breaking.”

— Michelangelo

44. “Carving is easy, you just go down to the skin and stop.”

— Michelangelo

45. “I give my soul to God, my body to the earth, and my worldly possessions to my nearest of kin, charging them to remember the sufferings of Jesus Christ.”

— Michelangelo

46. “I am a poor man and of little worth, who is laboring in that art that God has given me in order to extend my life as long as possible.”

— Michelangelo

47. “And who is so barbarous as not to understand that the foot of a man is nobler than his shoe, and his skin nobler than that of the sheep with which he is clothed.”

— Michelangelo

48. “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

49. “The hand that follows intellect can achieve.”

— Michelangelo

50. “Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come.”

— Michelangelo