Top 120 Michelangelo Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Sculpture is made by taking away, while painting is made by adding.”

— Michelangelo

52. “If I am more alive because love burns and chars me, as a fire, given wood or wind, feels new elation, it’s that he who lays me low is my salvation, and invigorates the more, the more he scars me.”

— Michelangelo

53. “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.”

— Michelangelo

54. “The more the marbles wastes, the more the statue grows.”

— Michelangelo

55. “Let whoever may have attained to so much as to have the power of drawing know that he holds a great treasure.”

— Michelangelo

56. “It is not sufficient merely to be a great master in painting and very wise, but I think that it is necessary for the painter to be very moral in his mode of life, or even, if such were possible, a saint, so that the Holy Spirit may inspire his intellect.”

— Michelangelo

57. “Poets and painters have the power to dare, I mean to dare to do whatever they may approve of...”

— Michelangelo

58. “I criticise by creation, not by finding fault.”

— Michelangelo

59. “Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.”

— Michelangelo

60. “My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth’s loveliness.”

— Michelangelo

61. “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

62. “I live and love in God’s peculiar light.”

— Michelangelo

63. “I am no artist – please come and help me.”

— Michelangelo

64. “I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.”

— Michelangelo

65. “A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to hear and see it.”

— Michelangelo

66. “With few words I shall make thee understand my soul.”

— Michelangelo

67. “Heaven-born, the soul a heavenward course must hold; beyond the world she soars; the wise man, I affirm, can find no rest in that which perishes, nor will he lend his heart to ought that doth time depend.”

— Michelangelo

68. “There is an angel imprisoned in it and I must set it free.”

— Michelangelo

69. “Nature did all things well.”

— Michelangelo

70. “The promises of this world are, for the most part, vain phantoms; and to confide in one’s self, and become something of worth and value is the best and safest course.”

— Michelangelo

71. “Do you know that women who are chaste remain much fresher than those who are not?”

— Michelangelo

72. “No thought is born in me that does not bear the image of death.”

— Michelangelo

73. “Love is a beautiful image Imagined or seen within the heart, The friend of virtue and gentility.”

— Michelangelo

74. “Serene I fold my hands and wait.”

— Michelangelo

75. “I serve for the love of God and in Him have all my hope.”

— Michelangelo

76. “Is it any wonder, since, when near the fire, I was melted and burned, if now that it’s extinguished outside me, it besets and consumes me inside, and bit by bit reduces me to ashes?”

— Michelangelo

77. “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

78. “Art is the gift of God, and must be used unto His glory. That in art is highest which aims at this.”

— Michelangelo

79. “He who does not master the nude cannot understand the principles of architecture.”

— Michelangelo

80. “I feast on wine and bread, and feasts they are.”

— Michelangelo

81. “Even if you are divine, you don’t disdain male consorts.”

— Michelangelo

82. “The best of artists has no conception that the marble alone does not contain within itself.”

— Michelangelo

83. “In my opinion painting should be considered excellent in proportion as it approaches the effect of relief, while relief should be considered bad in proportion as it approaches the effect of painting.”

— Michelangelo

84. “If the wine is not good, then throw it out!”

— Michelangelo

85. “If it be true that any beautiful thing raises the pure and just desire of man from earth to God, the eternal fount of all, such I believe my love.”

— Michelangelo

86. “Faith in oneself is the best and safest course.”

— Michelangelo

87. “Painters are not in any way unsociable through pride, but either because they find few pursuits equal to painting, or in order not to corrupt themselves with the useless conversation of idle people, and debase the intellect from the lofty imaginations in which they are always absorbed.”

— Michelangelo

88. “I was never the kind of painter or sculptor who kept a shop.”

— Michelangelo

89. “Perchance that I might learn what pity is, That I might laugh at erring men no more.”

— Michelangelo

90. “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.”

— Michelangelo

91. “The best of artists hath no thought to show which the rough stone in its superfluous shell doth not include; to break the marble spell is all the hand that serves the brain can do.”

— Michelangelo

92. “It is therefore indisputable that the limbs of architecture are derived from the limbs of man.”

— Michelangelo

93. “From such a gentle thing, from such a fountain of all delight, my every pain is born.”

— Michelangelo

94. “Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.”

— Michelangelo

95. “The power of one fair face makes my love sublime, for it has weaned my heart from low desires.”

— Michelangelo

96. “Painting and sculpture, labour and good faith, have been my ruin and I continually go from bad to worse. Better it would have been for me if I had set myself to making matches in my youth. I should not be in such distress of mind.”

— Michelangelo

97. “So take care of your life and take notice and be observant, for the number of widows is always far greater than the number of widowers.”

— Michelangelo

98. “If there is some good in me, it is because I was born in the subtle atmosphere of your country of Arezzo. Along with the milk of my nurse I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer, with which I make my figures.”

— Michelangelo

99. “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

100. “Forgiveness is divine, but never pay pull price for late pizza.”

— Michelangelo