Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Sculpture
The stone unhewn and cold
Becomes a living mould,
The more the marble wastes
The more the statue grows.
Michael Angelo—Sonnet. Mrs. Henry Roscoe’s trans.
Ex quovis ligno non fit Mercurius.
A Mercury is not made out of any block of wood.
Quoted by Appuleius as a saying of Pythagoras.
A sculptor wields
The chisel, and the stricken marble grows
To beauty.
Bryant—The Flood of Years.
Not from a vain or shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought.
Emerson—The Problem.
In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoön how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.
Emerson—Society and Solitude. Art.
Ex pede Herculem.
From the feet, Hercules.
Herodotus. Bk. IV. Sec. LXXXII. Plutarch. As quoted by Aulus Gellius. I. 1. Diogenes. V. 15.
Sculpture is more divine, and more like Nature,
That fashions all her works in high relief,
And that is Sculpture. This vast ball, the Earth,
Was moulded out of clay, and baked in fire;
Men, women, and all animals that breathe
Are statues, and not paintings.
Longfellow—Michael Angelo. Pt. III. 5.
Sculpture is more than painting. It is greater
To raise the dead to life than to create
Phantoms that seem to live.
Longfellow—Michael Angelo. Pt. III. 5.
And the cold marble leapt to life a God.
H. H. Milman—The Belvedere Apollo.
The Paphian Queen to Cnidos made repair
Across the tide to see her image there:
Then looking up and round the prospect wide,
When did Praxiteles see me thus? she cried.
Plato. In Greek Anthology.
Then marble, soften’d into life, grew warm.
Pope—Second Book of Horace. Ep. I. L. 146.
The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.
Ruskin—True and Beautiful. Sculpture.
So stands the statue that enchants the world,
So bending tries to veil the matchless boast,
The mingled beauties of exulting Greece.
Thomson—The Seasons. Summer. L. 1,346.
The marble index of a mind forever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
Wordsworth—The Prelude. Bk. III.