When they asked Michelangelo how he made his statue of David he is reported to have said, "It is easy. You just chip away the stone that doesn't look like David."
It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand.
Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.
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.
AS YOU GIVE OUT SO SHALL YOU RECEIVE.
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.
I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.
The best of artists has no conception that the marble alone does not contain within itself.
A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to hear and see it.
Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.
The greatest artist has no conception which a single block of white marble does not potentially contain within its mass, but only a hand obedient to the mind can penetrate to this image.
The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has.
Carving is easy, you just go down to the skin and stop.
Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come.
I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.
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?
It is necessary to keep one's compass in one's eyes and not in the hand, for the hands execute, but the eye judges.
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.
The best artist has that thought alone Which is contained within the marble shell; The sculptor's hand can only break the spell To free the figures slumbering in the stone.
