Michelangelo Buonarroti

"I paint myself because I am so much concerned with this subject and with my innermost feelings."

"I touch my subject as if I were blessing it."

"The statues and paintings are immortal, they do not fear death as man does."

"I have finished a picture of such a strange beauty as I think never has been seen."

"No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly."

"The true work of art is invisible."

"I believe the purpose of all art is to reveal the invisible."

"When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book."

"A block of marble is the same as a block of mind."

"In my end is my beginning."

"The touch of a master's hand is worth a thousand words."

"Life itself is the proper binge."

"I saw the angel in the stone and I carved him out."

"I have no time for the nonsense of aesthetics."

"My mother held me a prisoner to her heart."

"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it."

"I wish I could be as mysterious as a cat."

"Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends."

"The eternal is there, in the temporal."

"Every moment of light and dark is a miracle."

"There lives no greater poet than God."

"The greatest delight the fields and the woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable."

"I do not paint in order to make money."

"In creating, the only hard thing's to begin; a grass-blade's no easier to make than an oak."

"Lord, what a thing is the human soul, and what is its beauty."

"If you hear that I am dead, do not believe it."

"The artist is the lover of nature; therefore he is her slave and her master."

"The weight of a crown has broken the backs of men; it is therefore no light thing to wear one."

"I have become very wise with age."

"To know all is not to tell all."