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

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

“To touch is to give life…”

“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.

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. Your greatness is measured by your horizons.

He who takes love as his weapon, breaks destiny and hatred, force and misery. Love is a beautiful image, imagined or seen within the heart. Love is the friend of virtue and gentility.

Cruelty has no meaning where there is love, nor power where there is humility; meekness overcomes all opposition, as joy any suffering.

To know each other is the best way to understand each other. To understand each other is the only way to love each other. I live and love in God’s peculiar light.

If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all. If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn’t call it genius.

Genius is eternal patience. There is no greater harm than that of time wasted.

Beauty depends on purpose. It is in the elements best suited to their purpose or aim that beauty shines forth most strongly.

Beauty is the purgation of superfluities. 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.

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.

For those who feel it, nothing makes the soul so religious and pure as the endeavor to create something perfect; for God is perfection, and whoever strives after it, is striving after something divine. True painting is only the image of the perfection of God, a shadow of the pencil with which he paints, a melody, a striving after harmony. Only God creates; the rest of us just copy. Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all come. Art is the gift of God, and must be used unto His glory. That art is highest which aims at this.

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?

Souls will never ascend to Heaven until the sight of beauty lifts them there. My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth’s loveliness.

If we have been pleased with life, we should not be displeased with death, since it comes from the hand of the same master.

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

Quotes from Michelangelo Buonarroti, Complete Poems and Selected Letters

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~Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, known best as simply Michelangelo, was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect and poet of the High Renaissance born in the Republic of Florence, who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art.

©Excellence Reporter 2020