Quotes & Sayings About Masterpieces

A great painter does not content himself by affecting us with his masterpieces; ultimately, he succeeds in changing the landscape of our minds. Once — Orhan Pamuk

He was getting to be a certain age, he thought. It was the age when his never-to-be-written masterpieces had begun to outweigh the masterpieces he was still going to write. — Keith Gessen

For Dicey, writing in 1885, and for me reading him some seventy years later, the rule of law still had a very English, or at least Anglo-Saxon, feel to it. It was later, through Hayek's masterpieces The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation and Liberty that I really came to think this principle as having wider application. — Margaret Thatcher

Love is greater than marriage, love is the greater thing while marriage, though noble and honorable, is questionable in its origins. I question the creations of man, I do not question the masterpieces of God. — C. JoyBell C.

When you talk about painters and you talk about painters painting masterpieces, there is no painter who painted only one painting and that was a masterpiece. You have to do a whole bunch of paintings to get to the place of mastering your craft. — Walter Mosley

The family is one of nature's masterpieces. — George Santayana

The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. So it must be on every original artist to some degree, on me to a marked degree.
(from notes on 'Heraclitean Fire') — Gerard Manley Hopkins

When we dream with God, we become the masterpieces of His imagination. — Bill Johnson

The sincere love of books has nothing to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he may be in love with a woman. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

I don't ascribe to the idea of the ivory tower composer who sits alone in a room composing his masterpieces and then comes down from Mount Sinai with the tablets. It doesn't work like that. The job of a composer is putting something down on a piece of paper that will inspire the person who's playing. — John Zorn

Even the weakest and most vulnerable, the sick, the old, the unborn and the poor, are masterpieces of God's creation, made in his own image, destined to live for ever, and deserving of the utmost reverence and respect. — Pope Francis

Painting seems an old man's business. After a certain time you're out of it, and you just paint masterpieces. — Alex Katz

I don't make shit, I make masterpieces," she replied, pretending to take offence from Charlie's words. "And just for that, I'll take a BBQ sauce base with tuna, anchovies and pineapple please. — Beth Ashworth

And to celebrate I will create a series of masterpieces showing how wrong-headed and primitive you and your ideologies are, and it is this that will pave the way to the new truth! As the artist, everyone will pay attention to me, while without a body of art to speak for you... no one will ever even remember your name!" Monsters 101, Book Ten: Class Dismissed — Muhammad Rasheed

Some of the greatest masterpieces of art are created against the odds of reality.

from the book: stuff i think about — Sondra Faye

Bergman made countless masterpieces, but for one reason or another, 'Winter Light' stays closest to my heart. — Jake Paltrow

The adventure of the soul among the masterpieces. — Anatole France

When an artist works today or whenever, it's not about creating immortal masterpieces, because that's the one thing we don't decide ourselves. — Esa-Pekka Salonen

Some people write books, others paint masterpieces — Masterpieces From Brooklyn Museum

He pauses, looking around at the youthful faces staring up at him, their minds empty vessels waiting to be filled. So much to learn, so little time to do it in, such little passion within them to understand it truly. It is his job to give them passion. To share with them his experiences of travel, his knowledge of all the great masterpieces of centuries ago. — Cecelia Ahern

Michelangelo was asked by the pope about the secret of his genius, particularly how he carved the statue of David, largely considered the masterpiece of all masterpieces. His answer was: "It's simple. I just remove everything that is not David. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Jo told me once that she was an old woman everywhere but in her studio. "There I'm only myself," she'd said. Standing in the middle of masterpieces that only Jo had ever seen and touched, I knew what she meant. — Laura Anderson Kurk

I see now that dismissing YA books because you're not a young adult is a little bit like refusing to watch thrillers on the grounds that you're not a policeman or a dangerous criminal, and as a consequence, I've discovered a previously ignored room at the back of the bookstore that's filled with masterpieces I've never heard of. — Nick Hornby

Like water our ideals for writing what seems at first to be a calling to pen a masterpiece, it at first can be pure, fluid even (words can come easily) but we also have to learn to work with what our eyes glaze over as weak substitutes, words that we think have no substance to what we are learning towards. What is every poet's intention? Their intention is to forge, nullify, create, defend, fill the reader with the awe and inspiration that every poet themselves craves. They want to carve a name for themselves in the annals of history, leave a not so quiet legacy behind. Poets want immortality or rather they want their words to become immortal. Perhaps even Marlowe and Shakespeare had discussions about this. — Abigail George

All the masters have those weak points that are called masterpieces; and besides, they do them as crowd pleasers
to prove that they have the know-how. — Paul Gauguin

My job as an actor has inspired generations of children to become doctors. My job as a writer has opened up the minds of millions. My job as a director has produced masterpieces that will be taught in film school for ages. — Zach Braff

Kids draw masterpieces - they're the best painters ever. I think the same with music. They could totally write amazing music if they just had the right tools. It's important at that age to set up something, and then maybe afterwards you can go study your violin for 500 hours a week. But at least in the beginning you know about the options. — Bjork

Masterpieces are only lucky attempts. — George Sand

I have worked on very good movies that have been buried, and I've worked on some resounding mediocrities that have been paraded through the marketplace like they were masterpieces. — Tommy Lee Jones

We all have many opportunities, but limited capacity to pursue them. Make choices, focus your time and energy, so that you can submit your share of masterpieces to the greater good. — Kevin B. Rollins

No stone was left unturned in the unearthing of musical masterpieces."
About Egg, Book 1 "Making it — Jamie Scallion

And to lose the chance to see frigatebirds soaring in circles above the storm, or a file of pelicans winging their way homeward across the crimson afterglow of the sunset, or a myriad terns flashing in the bright light of midday as they hover in a shifting maze above the beach
why, the loss is like the loss of a gallery of the masterpieces of the artists of old time. — Theodore Roosevelt

Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out. — Oscar Wilde

I say
I've thought of a good plot for a detective story."
"Really?"
"Top
hole. You know, the sort that people bring out and say 'I've often thought of doing it myself, if only I could find time to sit down and write it.' I gather that sitting down is all that is necessary for producing masterpieces. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, commonly referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian novelist, writer, essayist, philosopher, Christian anarchist, pacifist, educational reformer, moral thinker, and an influential member of the Tolstoy family. As a fiction writer Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted for his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic depiction of Russian life, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. As a moral philosopher he was notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Source: Wikipedia — Leo Tolstoy

The development of objective thinking by the Greeks appears to have required a number of specific cultural factors. First was the assembly, where men first learned to persuade one another by means of rational debate. Second was a maritime economy that prevented isolation and parochialism. Third was the existence of a widespread Greek-speaking world around which travelers and scholars could wander. Fourth was the existence of an independent merchant class that could hire its own teachers. Fifth was the Iliad and the Odyssey, literary masterpieces that are themselves the epitome of liberal rational thinking. Sixth was a literary religion not dominated by priests. And seventh was the persistence of these factors for 1,000 years. — Carl Sagan

We should comfort ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages-stand quietly before them and wait till they speak to us. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Many people say, "Well, I'd love to make a decision like that, but I'm not sure how I could change my life." They're paralyzed by the fear that they don't know exactly how to turn their dreams
into reality. And as a result, they never make the decisions that could make their lives into the masterpieces they deserve to be. I'm here to tell you that it's not important initially to know how
you're going to create a result. What's important is to decide you will find a way, no matter what. — Anthony Robbins

I don't read reviews about myself with any special eagerness or attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and acumen, and I never reread them. — Vladimir Nabokov

We grew tired together, creating our own kind of art. We became the masterpieces of the loneliest souls. The colors in both of our eyes bled out, knowing that sometimes the most beautiful pieces of art were created from the darkest of souls. — Brittainy C. Cherry

There is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cervantes, and Molière, and Swift. — Agnes Repplier

My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs. — Manuel Puig

Many artists and writers have used cannabis for creative stimulation - from the writers of the world's religious masterpieces to our most irreverent satirists. — Jack Herer

When we teach a child to sing or play the flute, we teach her how to listen. When we teach her to draw, we teach her to see. When we teach a child to dance, we teach him about his body and about space, and when he acts on a stage, he learns about character and motivation. When we teach a child design, we reveal the geometry of the world. When we teach children about the folk and traditional arts and the great masterpieces of the world, we teach them to celebrate their roots and find their own place in history. — Jane Alexander

The problem is this: in order to make money- lots of money- we don't need flawless literary masterpieces. What we need is mediocre rubbish, trash suitable for mass consumption. More and more, bigger and bigger blockbusters of less and less significance. What counts is the paper we sell, not the words that are printed on it. — Walter Moers

The writer must proudly consent to bear his own date, knowing that there are no masterpieces in eternity, but only works in history, and that they survive only to the degree that they have left the past behind them and heralded the future. — Alain Robbe-Grillet

I draw people as I see them. I'm not involved in making artistic masterpieces. My, my object is to mirror people and I've always done that. — Jack Kirby

This pointing-hand gesture - with its index finger and thumb extended upward - is a well-known symbol of the Ancient Mysteries, and it appears all over the world in ancient art. This same gesture appears in three of Leonardo da Vinci's most famous encoded masterpieces - The Last Supper, Adoration of the Magi, and Saint John the Baptist. It's a symbol of man's mystical connection to God." As above, so below. The madman's bizarre choice of words was starting to feel more relevant now. "I've never seen it before," Sato said. Then watch ESPN, Langdon thought, always amused to see professional athletes point skyward in gratitude to God after a touchdown or home run. He wondered how many knew they were continuing a pre-Christian mystical tradition of acknowledging the mystical power above, which, for one brief moment, had transformed them into a god capable of miraculous feats. — Dan Brown

Our masterpieces are Shakespeare and Jane Austen and griots and Murasaki Shikibu, but they're also J.K. Rowling and Chuck Palahnuik and Douglas Adams and Amy Tan and Suzanne Collins and Chinua Achebe. Read. Read them all. Read the books you love, and try to read books you don't. Read the genres you love, but sometimes also read a book outside your comfort zone. Read voraciously. — Beth Revis

Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are egregiously mistaken. The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them. — Henry David Thoreau

We are similar to a museum. My function is to present old masterpieces in modern frames. — Rudolf Bing

Man is a marble piece; unlike Michelangelo's masterpieces, man is unconsciously carved and imperfectly shaped by the nature! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Humans are...extraordinary. It's a shame that we often forget that, and that we treat each other as anything less than the masterpieces we are. — Christina Daley

There is in the DNA of the Italians a bit of madness, which in the overwhelming majority of cases is positive. It is genius. It is talent. It's the masterpieces of art. It's the food, fashion, everything that makes Italy great in the world. — Matteo Renzi

In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys - literary masterpieces. I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations. I have tried to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art. I have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author - the joys and difficulties of creation. We did not talk around books, about books; we went to the center of this or that masterpiece, to the live heart of the matter. — Vladimir Nabokov

Wall-to-wall masterpieces, after all, ought to be preferred to wall-to-wall decorative arts, even if the decorative arts are of the highest quality peppered and salted with dukes and tiaras. — Joseph Alsop

We all act as independent learners in charge of designing our autodidactic curricula. Reading the books written by the prophetic genius of history including the literary masterpieces and philosophical treatises awakens the mind. Reading can act as a gateway drug leading to writing and expansion of a personal state of conscious awareness. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The fact that you couldn't see Alfred Hitchcock's first film The Mountain Eagle, or that you couldn't see so many of F.W. Murnau's masterpieces, or that you couldn't see so many of Oscar Micheaux's really intriguing race melodramas, made with fierce independent spirit against all odds in '20s and '30s America. That stuff haunted me. They really did bring to life a sense of 20th Century history: cultural history, pop history, gender politics and race politics, socio economic history, all that stuff. It was bracing and instructive. — Guy Maddin

Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and little wildflowers. — Roberto Bolano

In East of Eden, John Steinbeck wrote that there's never been a great creative collaboration. When the Beatles first burst on the scene, I thought they were proving him wrong. Later, we learned that Lennon and McCartney had each composed their pop masterpieces separately, individually. So it goes. — Tom Robbins

Even when they are geniuses in spite of it, their masterpieces are invariably warped. — Christopher Isherwood

The purpose of art is higher than art. What we are really interested in are masterpieces of humanity. — Alonzo King

If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is! — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

All I care for is the inclusion of my name in the list of the believers of the supremacy of human soul over all other masterpieces He has ever produced. — Annie Ali

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces. — Anatole France

stupid america

stupid america, see that
chicano
with a big knife
on his steady hand
he doesn't want to knife you
he wants to sit on a bench
and carve christfigures
but you won't let him.
stupid america, hear that
chicano
shouting curses on the street
he is a poet
without paper and pencil
and since he cannot write
he will explode.
stupid america, remember
that chicano
flunking math and english
he is the picasso
of your western states
but he will die
with one thousand
masterpieces
hanging only from his mind. — Abelardo Delgado

Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn't matter how beautifully you performed _sometimes_, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren't a painter or a writer
you didn't work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn't just your masterpieces that counted. What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability. Moments of inspiration were nothing compared to elimination of error. The scouts cared little for Henry's superhuman grace; insofar as they cared they were suckered-in aesthetes and shitty scouts. Can you perform on demand, like a car, a furnace, a gun? Can you make that throw one hundred times out of a hundred? If it can't be a hundred, it had better be ninety-nine. — Chad Harbach

I was very embarrassed when my canvases began to fetch high prices. I saw myself condemned to a future of nothing but Masterpieces. — Henri Matisse

Some programs have been theatrical masterpieces, but all we're seeing is the negative side of nuclear war. — Barry Goldwater

Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds. — Marcel Proust

In general, however, grand opera, by more and more deadening our musical receptivity through its three-hours duration and at the same time putting our patience to the test through the snail's pace of what is usually a very trite action, is in itself intrinsically and essentially boring; which failing can be overcome only by the excessive excellence of an individual achievement: that is why in this genre only the masterpieces are enjoyable and everything mediocre is unendurable. — Arthur Schopenhauer

To write only according to the rules laid down by masterpieces signifies that one is not a master but a pupil. — David Shields

Freedom does not guarantee masterpieces. — E. M. Forster

That genius is feeble which cannot hold its own before the masterpieces of the world. — Thomas Wentworth Higginson

When we think of the masterpieces that nobody praised and nobody read, back there in the past, we feel an impatient superiority to the readers of the past. If we had been there, we can't help feeling, we'd have known that Moby-Dick was a good book - -why, how could anyone help knowing?
But suppose someone says to us, "Well, you're here now: what's our own Moby-Dick? What's the book that, a hundred years from now, everybody will look down on us for not having liked?" What do we say then? — Randall Jarrell

I acquired courage from the masterpieces of sages. I came of age by their instructions to keep going, even in hard times. Then I learnt not to despair, even when it seemed that my world is falling apart. I learnt to possess fortitude. — Ogwo David Emenike

Painter"
"I said you are only keeping me here
in the hospital, lying to my parents
and saying I am madder than I am,
because you only want to keep me here,
squeezing my last dollar to the pennies
I'm saner than anyone in the hospital.
I had to say what every madman says
a black phrase, the sleep of reason mothers monsters ...
When I am painting the canvas is a person;
all I do, each blot and line's alive,
when I am finished, it is shit on the canvas ...
But in his sketches more finished than his oils,
sketches made after he did those masterpieces,
constable can make us see the breeze ... — Robert Lowell

There's nowhere like Detroit; it's a modern necropolis: all these art deco masterpieces crumbling away. — Malik Bendjelloul

At the time that they were shown, the Brillo Boxes were underappreciated. It's only now, with the patina of history, that we can really see these masterpieces in a clear light. — Mike Bidlo

The areas off the greens are masterpieces. I don't think there's anything like it in North America. — Ben Crenshaw

For any director with a little lucidity, masterpieces are films that come to you by accident. — Sidney Lumet

Do not turn the superior eye of critical passivity upon these efforts ... We must not be ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint-box. — Winston Churchill

Politics is the only art whose artists regularly disown their masterpieces. — Raheel Farooq

The love of a father is one of nature's greatest masterpieces. — Helen Lowrie Marshall

This is what great masterpieces must feel like on museum walls - like sighing, like climbing out of their rigidly stretched frames, and falling, boneless, into a lover's glance. — Leylah Attar

I was created by the all powerful God to fill the universe with my masterpieces. — El Greco

You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces - just good food from fresh ingredients. — Julia Child

The coops were finished. They were not masterpieces, and I have seen chickens pause before them in deep thought, as who should say: "Now what in the world have we struck here?" But they were coops, within the meaning of the act, and we induced the hens to become tenants. — P.G. Wodehouse

We magistrates find that reason is the easiest thing in the world to dispense with; banished from our law courts as it is from our heads, we delight in trampling it underfoot, and that is what makes our judicial sentences such masterpieces, since (although commonsense never presides in them) those sentences are carried out with as much firmness as if people knew what they actually meant. — Marquis De Sade

I taught myself how to draw, and I soon found out it was what I really wanted to do. I didn't think I was going to create any great masterpieces like Rembrandt or Gauguin. I thought comics was a common form of art, and strictly American in my estimation, because America was the home of the common man - and show me the common man that can't do a comic. So comics is an American form of art that anyone can do with a pencil and paper. — Jack Kirby

All the masterpieces of art contain both light and shadow. A happy life is not one filled with only sunshine, but one which uses both light and shadow to produce beauty. — Billy Graham

Know your literary tradition, savor it, steal from it, but when you sit down to write, forget about worshiping greatness and fetishizing masterpieces. — Allegra Goodman

The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in. — Voltaire

Exhibitions of minority art are often intended to make the minority itself more aware of its collective experience. Reinforcing the common memory of miseries and triumphs will, it is expected, strengthen the unity of the group and its determination to achieve a better future. But emphasizing shared experience as opposed to the artist's consciousness of self (which includes his personal and unshared experience of masterpieces) brings to the fore the tension in the individual artist between being an artist and being a minority artist. — Harold Rosenberg

Pellerin used to read every available book on aesthetics, in the hope of discovering the true theory of Beauty, for he was convinced that once he had found it he would be able to paint masterpieces. — Gustave Flaubert

My mother's songs are really turning out to be masterpieces. I have inherited this incredible legacy and am so fortunate to bathe in her sensibilities. It is tinged with tragedy. I'd much rather she was here in person, but there is still a positive force to come out of her death and that is having the gift of music that she gave. — Rufus Wainwright

Nothing is likely about masterpieces, least of all whether there will be any. — Igor Stravinsky

Readers have no doubt noticed how seldom builders live in houses of their own construction. You will find a town or village expanding in all directions with their masterpieces of modernity in the way of houses and bungalows; but the builder himself you will usually find living nearer the heart of things, snugly and comfortably housed in some more substantial, if less convenient, building of less recent date. — Flora Thompson

God can take the ugly stains in our lives, those scars that run deep, and transform them into masterpieces of His grace and mercy that will bless others. It's time for a makeover. Even now God can turn the ugliness of sin into beauty marks. Just come to Him and ask. Surrender your scars to His gentle touch. — Anne Graham Lotz

Within the category of Kitsch we can thus distinguish between more and less successful paintings. Kitsch, too has its masterpieces. — Karsten Harries