Top 120 Michelangelo Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “The hand that follows intellect can achieve.”

— 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. “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

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

— Michelangelo

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

— Michelangelo

56. “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

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

— Michelangelo

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

— Michelangelo

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

— Michelangelo

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

— Michelangelo

61. “Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.”

— Michelangelo

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

— Michelangelo

63. “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

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

— Michelangelo

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

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

— Michelangelo

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

— Michelangelo

73. “Nature did all things well.”

— Michelangelo

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

— Michelangelo

75. “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

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

— Michelangelo

77. “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

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

— Michelangelo

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

— Michelangelo

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

— Michelangelo

81. “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

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

— Michelangelo

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

— Michelangelo

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

— Michelangelo

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

— Michelangelo

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

— Michelangelo

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

— Michelangelo

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

— Michelangelo

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

— Michelangelo

90. “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

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

— Michelangelo

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

— Michelangelo

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

— Michelangelo

94. “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

95. “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

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

— Michelangelo

97. “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

98. “What one has most to work and struggle for in painting is to do the work with a great amount of labour and sweat in such a way that it may afterward appear, however much it was laboured upon, to have been done almost quickly and almost without any labour, and very easily, although it was not.”

— Michelangelo

99. “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

100. “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