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Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.

— Michelangelo

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Notes from Wikiquote

As quoted in Character Sketches: Or, The Blackboard Mirror (1890) by George Augustus Lofton, p. 432.

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Beauty

More quotes by Michelangelo

Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.

I was never the kind of painter or sculptor who kept a shop.

The hand that follows intellect can achieve.

The stone unhewn and cold
Becomes a living mould,
The more the marble wastes
The more the statue grows.

With chiseled touch
The stone unhewn and cold
Becomes a living mould,
The more the marble wastes,
The more the statue grows.

All Michelangelo quotes →

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Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.

Democritus Freeman (1948)

True beauty dwells in deep retreats,
Whose veil is unremoved
Till heart with heart in concord beats,
And the lover is beloved.

William Wordsworth

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.

William Shakespeare The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Michelangelo (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.