Michelangelo Buonarroti

Michelangelo Buonarroti (March 6, 1475 - February 18, 1564) was an Italian architect, painter, poet and sculptor.

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Your lordship, only worldly light in this age of ours, you can never be pleased with another man's work for there is no man who resembles you, nor one to equal you. . . It grieves me greatly that I cannot recapture my past, so as to longer be at your service. As it is, I can only offer you my future, which is short, for I am too old. . . That is all I have to say. Read my heart for "the quill cannot express good will."
- In a letter to Tommaso dei Cavalieri dated 1533 January 1st
Caro m' è 'l sonno, e più l'esser di sasso,
Mentre che 'l danno e la vergogna dura:
Non veder, non sentir, m' è gran ventura;
Però non mi destar, deh! parla basso
- in reply to Giovan Battista Strozzi's epigram for the Night.
- Translation: Welcome is sleep, more welcome the sleep of stone Whilst crime and shame continue in the land; My happy fortune, not to see or hear; Waken me not - in mercy, whisper low.

What good I have comes from the pure air of your native Arezzo, and also because I sucked in chisels and hammers with my nurse's milk.
- as said to his biographer Giorgio Vasari

The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.

What do you despise? By this you are truly known.
- A few sites, perhaps most of them deriving their information from its previous placement among the "Attributed" quotes here, credit this to Michelangelo, but so far as definite citations go, it almost certainly originated with Frank Herbert when he used the phrase in the novel Dune (1965).