Trifles go to make perfection, And perfection is no trifle.
A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.
Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.
I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
I hope that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.
If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.