Read the heart and not the letter for the pen cannot draw near the good intent.
Interpretation
Understand the intentions behind someone's words rather than just their literal meaning.
This quote emphasizes the importance of discerning the true intentions and emotions behind the words people say, suggesting that effective communication comes from understanding the heart and feelings of others rather than merely focusing on the surface-level meaning. Michelangelo implies that good intentions can often be misinterpreted if one only looks at the words used, urging us to look deeper for genuine understanding.
In practice
In a discussion on emotional intelligence, this quote can highlight the importance of empathy.
The art of creation lies in the gift of perceiving the particular and generalizing it, thus creating the particular again. It is therefore a powerful transforming force and a generator of creative solutions in relation to a given problem.
The best artist has that thought alone Which is contained within the marble shell; The sculptor's hand can only break the spell To free the figures slumbering in the stone.
Art lives on constraint and dies of freedom.
If it be true that any beautiful thing raises the pure and just desire of man from earth to God, the eternal fount of all, such I believe my love.
Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come.
There is an angel imprisoned in it and I must set it free.
In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs.
Avoid banquets which are given by strangers an ignorant persons. But if there is ever occasion to join them, let your attention be carefully fixed, that you slip not into the manner of the vulgar (the uninstructed).
Youth eats all the sugared fancy cakes and regards them as its daily bread. But there'll come a time when you'll start asking just for a crust.
Good actions are a guard against the blows of adversity.
It is a great piece of skill to know how to guide your luck even while waiting for it.
God never witholds from His child that which His love and wisdom call good. God's refusals are always merciful -- "severe mercies" at times but mercies all the same. God never denies us our hearts desire except to give us something better.
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