Michelangelo

If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.

Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

Carving is easy, you just go down to the skin and stop.

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

Even if you are divine, you don't disdain male consorts.

Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come.

Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.

From such a gentle thing, from such a fountain of all delight, my every pain is born.

Genius is eternal patience.

I live in sin, to kill myself I live; no longer my life my own, but sin's; my good is given to me by heaven, my evil by myself, by my free will, of which I am deprived.

If in my youth I had realized that the sustaining splendour of beauty of with which I was in love would one day flood back into my heart, there to ignite a flame that would torture me without end, how gladly would I have put out the light in my eyes.