Michelangelo Quotes

“If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn't call it genius. ”
― Michelangelo Buonarroti

“Authors can write stories without people assuming that they are autobiographies, but songwriters and poets are often considered to be the characters in their works. I like Michelangelo's vision, 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
― Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile

“Homer, in the second book of the Iliad says with fine enthusiasm, "Give me masturbation or give me death." Caesar, in his Commentaries, says, "To the lonely it is company; to the forsaken it is a friend; to the aged and to the impotent it is a benefactor. They that are penniless are yet rich, in that they still have this majestic diversion." In another place this experienced observer has said, "There are times when I prefer it to sodomy." Robinson Crusoe says, "I cannot describe what I owe to this gentle art." Queen Elizabeth said, "It is the bulwark of virginity." Cetewayo, the Zulu hero, remarked, "A jerk in the hand is worth two in the bush." The immortal Franklin has said, "Masturbation is the best policy." Michelangelo and all of the other old masters--"old masters," I will remark, is an abbreviation, a contraction--have used similar language. Michelangelo said to Pope Julius II, "Self-negation is noble, self-culture beneficent, self-possession is manly, but to the truly great and inspiring soul they are poor and tame compared with self-abuse." Mr. Brown, here, in one of his latest and most graceful poems, refers to it in an eloquent line which is destined to live to the end of time--"None knows it but to love it; none name it but to praise.”
― Mark Twain, On Masturbation

“Not without deep pain do we admit to ourselves that the artists of all ages have in their highest flights carried to heavenly transfiguration precisely those conceptions that we now recognize as false: they are the glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of humanity, and they could not have done this without their belief in the absolute truth of these errors. Now if the belief in such truth generally diminishes, if the rainbow colors at the outermost ends of human knowing and imagining fade: then the species of art that, like the Divina commedia, Raphael's pictures, Michelangelo's frescoes, the Gothic cathedrals, presupposes not only a cosmic, but also a metaphysical significance for art objects can never blossom again. A touching tale will come of this, that there was once such an art, such belief by artists.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Bleed me of art, and there won't be enough liquid left in me to spit! [Michelangelo Buonorotti]”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“You said how Michelangelo was a manic-depressive who portrayed himself as a flayed martyr in his painting. Henri Matisse gave up being a lawyer because of appendicitis. Robert Schumann only began composing after his right hand became paralyzed and ended his career as a concert pianist. (...) You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Bronte sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O’Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

“According to Thomas Mann,” Peter said, “‘Great artists are great invalids.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness, except that which associates itself especially with romantic love. Yet the cleanliness and dignity of Michel Angelo's male figures are incontestable, and bear striking witness to that nobility of the sentiment in him, which we have already seen illustrated in his sonnets.”
― Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study Of Some Transitional Types Of Men And Women

“I believe in a benevolent God not because He created the Grand Canyon or Michelangelo, but because He gave us snacks.”
― Paul Rudnick, I Shudder and Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey

“Galli to Michelangelo: “In the days of the emperors, you would have been designing colosseums, baths, and reservoirs. Instead, you’ve created a soul.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstacy

“The olives are pressed for oil, the wood is burned cooking soup. Both are consumed. Art has a magic quality: the more minds that digest it, the longer it lives.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“Michelangelo on sculpture: “I feel about each new figure the way an astronomer does each time he discovers a new star: one more fragment of the universe has been filled in.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“Bleed me of art, and there won’t be enough liquid left in me to spit.” - Michelangelo”
― Irving Stone

“Evidently, Michelangelo was intrigued to contemplate the aftermath of his own experience of eliciting beauty from abstract rock.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“Soderini was obliged to explain to Julius that Michelangelo was not to take a step unless he had in his hand a letter of safe conduct from Francesco Alidosi, cardinal of Pavia, the pope’s closest confidant and the man who had overseen the initial transfer of one thousand ducats for the pope’s tomb. Soderini emphasized that above all, they must deal very gently with Michelangelo lest they cause him to flee from Florence, as he had already attempted twice.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“Perhaps no artist in history had ever been treated so gingerly.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“By provoking separate studies of monumental male nudes in self-consciously handsome postures, he established the curriculum for generations of imitators.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“A face half-trapped in stone is a terrible image, and indeed, Michelangelo’s renown for terribilita-which connotes the possession of awesome force begins here with this single unfinished apostle.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“Nothing about the figure alludes to its identity apart from the book, which remains embedded in the rough-cut rock like the rest of its body. Only the apostle’s left knee projects sufficiently to raise the shape of breaking out.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“One suspects he disdained the traditional preparations of drawing and modeling in favor of cutting straight into the marble containing the captive soul yearning for release. The result is a kind of metaphor perhaps unconscious for the struggle of artistic creation. The only way Michelangelo could show us this was to leave the figure half-embedded in the rock.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“With his wayward artist once again firmly in his grasp, the pope set to work surveying the old medieval wall of the northern periphery of the city.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“Toward the end of 1508, when most of the rooms were already frescoed, Bramante brought in a new talent, Raphael Sanzio, to execute the library. When Julius had eyes on his painting in the Stanza della Segnatura, he fired the painters who had nearly finished the new decorations for his private quarters and ordered Raphael to redo their works as he saw fit. The paintings that had so stunned Julius is today called The School of Athens. In it, Raphael created a visual anthology of classical philosophy that included many recognizable portraits in the crowd of erudites. We see his self-portrait as a golden-haired youth of extraordinary beauty, Bramante as Euclid holding class in geometry, Leonardo as Plato exhorting Aristotle to lift his gaze upward. Michelangelo’s portrait is the most like him, down to his negligent dress. He appears in the center of the foreground as Heraclitus, the melancholy philosopher, slumped over a makeshift table, alone in his thoughts.”
― John T. Spike, Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

“Als aan de grond genageld stond ik voor Masaccio’s Verbanning uit het paradijs. In een sombere, bruine omgeving, die in niets leek op een tuin, hield Adam zijn gebogen hoofd bedekt met zijn handen. Eva’s ogen waren gewonde holtes die bijna dicht waren geknepen en haar openstaande mond uitte een gekwelde kreet die door de tijd echode en in mijn hart weergalmde. Het pathos van hun schaamte ontroerde me zo erg dat mijn benen verslapten. Ik hield me vast aan de stenen balustrade. Tussen Eva en mij voelde ik geen kloof van eeuwen gapen.
“Ik wil haar in mijn armen nemen om haar te troosten,” zei ik zacht.
“Michelangelo, Rafaël en Botticelli zaten precies hier dit fresco na te tekenen,” zei Pietro met een nonchalance alsof hij meer dan honderd jaar geleden tussen ze had gestaan.”
― Susan Vreeland, The Passion of Artemisia

“Michelangelo alone would tolerate no half-and-half. Clarity he wanted and he would have. The question of form was for him a religious matter; for him and only for him it was all or nothing. And this is the explanation of the lonely fearful wrestlings of this man, surely the unhappiest figure in our art; of the fragmentary, the tortured, the unsatisfied, the terrible in his forms that frightened his contemporaries. No man ever made a more honest effort than he did to find a way with the chisel into a buried world.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol 1: Form and Actuality

“So you slept with a Medici. It doesn’t stop you being Michelangelo.”
― Kevin Wignall, Those Who Disappeared

“Michelangelo sculpted La Pietà when he was 23. At 23, members of my generation could not build even the most miserable of sandcastles.”
― Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

“Dante and Hopkins, Mozart and Palestrina, Michelangelo and El Greco, Bramante and Gaudi have brought more souls to God than all the preachers of Texas.”
― Dana Gioia, The Catholic Writer Today: And Other Essays

“Michelangelo sculpted La Pietá when he was 23. At 23, members of my generation couldn’t build even the smallest and most miserable of sandcastles.”
― Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

“The Colossus of Florence. That’s what “David” by Michelangelo should aptly be called. It’s more than a sculpture.”
― Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

“Michelangelo was just 26 when he sculpted the David. The slab of marble he used was deemed unusable for 35 years. Why? Experience and age are not the same as creativity or competence.”
― Richie Norton

“A fabulist should always add to his cache of exceptional lore the quintessence of relevant and truly undying art. I rue the decimation of prized possessions bequeathed by masters of unassailable clods – inestimable Carrara and other lumpy raiment of earth. Michelangelo’s engaging masterpiece La Pieta has, since my fourteenth year, reminded me of the aftermath of the silence of the Creed of exalted balances. One of art’s points of coronation.”
― Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu