Michelangelo Buonarroti Quotes

If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn't call it genius.

Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.

O night, O sweetest time, though black of hue,with peace you force all the restless work to end;those who exalt you see and understand,and he is sound of mind who honours you.You cut the thread of tired thoughts, for soyou offer calm in your moist shade; you sendto this low sphere the dreams where we ascendup to the highest, where I long to go.Shadow of death that brings to quiet closeall miseries that plague the heart and soul,for those in pain the last and best of cures;you heal the flesh of its infirmities,dry and our tears and shut away our toil,and free the good from wrath and fretting cares.

Precious is sleep, better to be of stone,while the oppression and the shame still last;not seeing and not hearing, I am blest;so do not wake me, hush! keep your voice down.

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

What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?

Critique by creating.

But if it so happens ... a work ... under pain of otherwise becoming shameful or false, requires fantasy ... [and that] certain limbs or elements of a figure are altered by borrowing from other species, for example transforming into a dolphin the hinder end of a griffon or a stag ... these alterations will be excellent and the substitution, however unreal it may seem, deserves to be declared a fine invention in the genre of the monstrous.When a painter introduces into this kind of work of art chimerae and other imaginary beings in order to divert and entertain the senses and also to captivate the eyes of mortals who long to see unclassified and impossible things, he shows himself more respectful of reason than if he produced the usual figures of men or of animals.