The Agony and the Ecstasy Quotes

“Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive. It will cost you your life.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“One should not become an artist because he can, but because he must. It is only for those who would be miserable without it.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?"
"Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“To try to understand another human being, to grapple for his ultimate depths, that is the most dangerous of human endeavors.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“He had always loved God. In his darkest hours he cried out, "God did not create us to abandon us.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“The most perfect guide is nature. Continue without fail to draw something every day.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“Listen, my friend, all forms that exist in God's universe can be found in the human figure. A man's body and face can tell everything he represents. So how could I ever exhaust my interest in it?”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“An artist without ideas is a mendicant; barren, he goes begging among the hours.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“We...believe that art is religious, because it is one of man's highest aspirations. There is no such thing as pagan art, only good and bad art.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo

“Drawing is the poet's written line, set down to see if there be a story worth telling, a truth worth revealing.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“What we know of others is our personal secret.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“Bleed me of art, and there won't be enough liquid left in me to spit! [Michelangelo Buonorotti]”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“What meaning has a compliment if one hears it night and day.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“We are giving the world back to man, and man back to himself. Man shall no longer be vile, but noble. We shall not destroy his mind in return for an immortal soul. Without a free, vigorous and creative mind, man is but an animal, and he will die like an animal, without any shred of a soul. We return to man his arts, his literature, his sciences, his independence to think and feel as an individual, not to be bound to dogma like a slave, to rot in his chains.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“The sculptor is master of time; he can change his subjects forward or back.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“He had never believed that spirituality had to be anemic or aesthetic.
”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo

“That was how his pen finally designed his sculpture; in the center the weak,
confused, arrogant, soon to be destroyed young man holding cup a loft, behind him the idyllic child, clear-eyed, munching his grapes, symbol of joy
; between them the tiger skin. The Bacchus, hollow within himself, flabby, reeling, already old; the Satyr,
eternally young and gay, symbol of man’s childhood and naughty innocence”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“...and rout the magical mystical moonlight with fierce proof of its own greater power to light, to heat, to make everything known.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“One should not become an artist because he can, but because he must. It is only for those who would be miserable without it.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“Alla guerra di amor vince chi fugge.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“It's pleasant to get used to the expensive, the soft, the comfortable. Once you're addicted, it's so easy to become a sycophant, to trim the sails of your judgment in order to be kept on. The next step is to change your work to please those in power, and that is death to the sculptor.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“L'arte è fatta per coloro che si sente indegno senza di essa.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“It was like penetrating deep into white marble with the pounding live thrust of
his chisel beating upward through the warm living marble with one ”Go!”, his whole body behind the heavy hammer, penetrating through ever deeper and deeper furrows of soft yielding living substance until he had reached the explosive climax, and all of his
fluid strength, love, passion, desire had been poured into the nascent form, and the marble block, made to love the and of the true sculptor, and responded, giving of its inner heat
and substance and fluid form, until at last the sculptor and the marble had totally coalesced, so deeply penetrating and infusing each other that they had become one, marble and man and organic unity, each fulfilling the other in the greatest act of art and love known to the human species.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“A new doctor had been sent for, Lazzaro of Pavia, who had administered to Lorenzo a pulverized mixture of diamonds and pearls. This hitherto infallible medicine had failed to help.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“Lorenzo il Magnifico, the Plato Four, the humanists had taught him that man was the center of the universe; and this was never more demonstrable that when he stood looking upward and found himself, a lone individual, serving as the central pole holding up the tarpaulin of sun and clouds, moon and stars, knowing that, lone or abandoned as he might feel, without his support the heavens would fall.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“He believed that every individual was responsible for his conduct on earth, that there was a judge within. Could even a blazingly Christ inflict greater retribution? Could Dante's Charon in his rowboat on the river Acheron whip the miscreants into a deeper, more everlasting hell than man's unvarnished verdict of himself?”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“Even in your kindness there is a cruel revelation. Life is cruel, never love.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“... sculpture bore the relationship the truth did to falsehood... if a painter blundered, what did he do? He patched and repaired and covered over with another layer of paint. The sculptor on the contrary had to see within th marble the form that it held. He could not glue back broken parts.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“As he reached the door of the chapel and turned back for a last look, he saw that the Virgin too was sad and lonely; the most alone human being God ever put on earth.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy