Michelangelo Quotes
A good artist ought never to allow impatience to overcome his sense of the main end of art - perfection
The best of artists has no conception that the marble alone does not contain within itself.
Do not be concerned that you might set a target too high and fail. Be concerned that you will set it too low and succeed.
Many believe - and I believe - that I have been designated for this work by God. In spite of my old age, I do not want to give it up; I work out of love for God and I put all my hope in Him.
You know what I would like to do: make a film with actors standing in empty space so that the spectator would have to imagine the background of the characters.
If it be true that any beautiful thing raises the pure and just desire of man from earth to God, the eternal fount of all, such I believe my love.
I am a poor man and of little worth, who is laboring in that art that God has given me in order to extend my life as long as possible.
My work is like digging, it's archaeological research among the arid materials of our times. That's how I understand my first films, and that's what I'm still doing...
The greatest danger for those working in the cinema is the extraordinary possibility it offers for lying.
I always mistrust everything I see, which an image shows me, because I imagine what is beyond it. And what is beyond an image cannot be known.
How wrong are those simpletons, of whom the world is full, who look more at... color than at the figures which show spirit and movement.
When a scene is being shot, it is very difficult to know what one wants it to say, and even if one does know, there is always a difference between what one has in mind and the result on film.
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.
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.
When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them.
I meant exactly what I said: that we are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science.
Till now I have never shot a scene without taking account of what stands behind the actors because the relationship between people and their surroundings is of prime importance.
And who is so barbarous as not to understand that the foot of a man is nobler than his shoe, and his skin nobler than that of the sheep with which he is clothed.
Can't you see the angel imprisoned in the block of stone trying to get out? I am trying to free him
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.
Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer.
The power of one fair face makes my love sublime, for it has weaned my heart from low desires.
Let whoever may have attained to so much as to have the power of drawing know that he holds a great treasure.
The mind, the soul, becomes ennobled by the endeavour to create something perfect, for God is perfection, and whoever strives after perfection is striving for something devine.
