Yquotes.com

 

As when, O lady mine,
With chiselled touch
The stone unhewn and cold
Becomes a living mould,
The more the marble wastes,
The more the statue grows.
--
Sonnet addressed to Vittoria Colonna; tr. Mrs. Henry Roscoe (Maria Fletcher Roscoe), Vittoria Colonna: Her Life and Poems (1868), p. 169.

 

Michelangelo Buonarroti

» Michelangelo Buonarroti - all quotes »

Similar quotes

 

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

 

Seamus Heaney

 

Every human being has within him an ideal man, just as every piece of marble contains in a rough state a statue as beautiful as the one that Praxiteles the Greek made of the god Apollo.

 

Jose Marti

 

Where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind forever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

 

William Wordsworth

 

“O Balder, he who fashion’d us,
And bade us live and move,
Shall weave for Death’s sad heavenly hair
Immortal flowers of love.
“Ah! never fail’d my servant Death,
Whene’er I named his name,—
But at my bidding he hath flown
As swift as frost or flame.
“Yea, as a sleuth-hound tracks a man,
And finds his form, and springs,
So hath he hunted down the gods
As well as human things!
“Yet only thro’ the strength of Death
A god shall fall or rise —
A thousand lie on the cold snows,
Stone still, with marble eyes.
“But whosoe’er shall conquer Death,
Tho’ mortal man he be,
Shall in his season rise again,
And live, with thee, and me!
“And whosoe’er loves mortals most
Shall conquer Death the best,
Yea, whosoe’er grows beautiful
Shall grow divinely blest.”
The white Christ raised his shining face
To that still bright’ning sky.
“Only the beautiful shall abide,
Only the base shall die!”

 

Robert Williams Buchanan