Top 100 Quotes About Great Works
#1. Something I learned from the Serbian tribes. Churches are built where saints were martyred. A bridge requires a child in its foundations if it is to hold. All great works must begin with a sacrifice.
Grady Hendrix
#2. All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.
Albert Camus
#3. It is the Master of Self who is the masterpiece; the life lived is the canvas that reveals the Master's great works.
Jo-Ann L. Tremblay
#4. Art is not an investment. Art is something you buy because you are financially solvent enough to give yourself a pleasure of living with great works rather than having to just see them in museums. People who are buying art at the top of the market as an investment are foolish.
Arne Glimcher
#5. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.
Samuel Johnson
#6. The great works are produced in such an ecstasy of love that they must always be unworthy of it, however great their worth otherwise.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#7. All the great things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they who have founded religions and created great works of art.
Marcel Proust
#8. The great works belong to no one nation, no one cultural tradition even. They are universal.
George Brandis
#9. Embrace the moment, your life will be whatever you want to make of it. Be inspired to do great works. You aren't finished yet. Go for your goals!
Sereda Aleta Dailey
#10. Poe had this curious kind of alchemical courage, where he took all the terrible things and terrors that happened in his life, all this shame and fear and pain, and turned them into great works of art. He was a complex, brilliant person who was just wired too tight.
John Cusack
#11. Reading great works of literature, discovering poetry, and listening to the best composers are all ways that we learn to love the Creator more.
Jennifer A. Marshall
#12. Good works lean on each other.
Great works lean on Faith and Hope.
Lasting works lean on Love.
Jackson Badgenoone
#13. Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone.
Leo Tolstoy
#14. An acquaintance with the great works of art and thought is the only real insurance against the barbarism of the time.
Edmund Wilson
#15. Discipline yourself to be a disciple of great works and to do that excellently, you have to wave "bye-bye" to some things and then switch off your inner person not to go near them again!
Israelmore Ayivor
#16. Wherefore in all great works are Clerks so much desired? Wherefore are Auditors so well-fed? What causeth Geometricians so highly to be enhaunsed? Why are Astronomers so greatly advanced? Because that by number such things they find, which else would farre excell mans minde.
Robert Recorde
#17. Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.
Marcel Proust
#18. That, of course, is what great works of imagination do for us: They make us a little restless, destabilize us, question our preconceived notions and formulas.
Azar Nafisi
#19. I don't know what motivated the artist, which means that the paintings have an intrinsic quality. I think Goethe called it the 'essential dimension,' the thing that makes great works of art great.
Gerhard Richter
#20. When you examine the genesis of great works of art, successful start-ups, and revolutionary shifts in politics, you can always trace back a history of monetary and nonmonetary exchange, the hidden patrons and underlying favors.
Amanda Palmer
#21. Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
Eugenio Montale
#22. Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.
Albert Camus
#23. When I look at great works of art or listen to inspired music, I sense intimate portraits of the specific times in which they were created.
Billy Joel
#24. Think about how many great works of art or game-changing ideas were ahead of their time - their creator's talent underappreciated until many years later. That's how we need to treat our young people - because who knows where the next great idea will come from?
Ashley Bryan
#25. Great works are done when one is not calculating and thinking.
D.T. Suzuki
#29. By being impatient, matters are damaged and great works cannot be done
Yamamoto Tsunetomo
#30. There are people who buy pictures because they were difficult to do, and are done. Such pictures are often only a record of pain and dull perseverance. Great works of art should look as though they were made in joy. Real joy is a tremendous activity, dull drudgery is nothing to it.
Robert Henri
#31. Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.
Anne Lamott
#32. Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.
Gilbert Murray
#33. What people regard as vanity - leaving great works, having children, acting in such a way as to prevent one's name from being forgotten - I regard as the highest expression of human dignity.
Paulo Coelho
#34. I think it's always hard for people to get their head around the fact that populist, commercial films can also actually be great works of art.
Helen Mirren
#35. If you are not skillful enough to sketch a man jumping out of a window in the time it takes him to fall from the fourth storey to the ground, you will never be able to produce great works.
Eugene Delacroix
#36. I am especially indebted to a 10th grade English teacher who encouraged me to read great works of literature.
Samuel Alito
#37. The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying the history of philosophy ultimately serves their better understanding.
Karl Jaspers
#38. But can they [great works] get rid of the worm that lies gnawing at the roots of my heart? No, never.
Edvard Munch
#39. If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.
Samuel Johnson
#40. Great works of the imagination are not produced quickly nor do they take quick effect on the popular mind.
John Dos Passos
#41. Realism and Naturalism rely mostly on the eye of the flesh. Abstract, conceptual and surrealistic art rely mostly on the eye of the mind. Great works of art rely on the eye of contemplation, the eye of the spirit.
Alex Grey
#42. The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers "I've read it already" to be a conclusive argument against reading a work ... Those read great works,on the other hand will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of there life.
C.S. Lewis
#43. I hate performers who debase great works of art; I long for their annihilation.
George Bernard Shaw
#44. As I developed as an artist and studied art history, I noticed that all the great works were dealing with the human condition. [Art] had humor in it. It had sex in it. But it also had sorrow running through it.
Eric Drooker
#45. For my part, I wish, with Mr. Howells, that the literature of the past might be purged of all that is ugly and barbarous in it, although I should object as much as any one to having these great works weakened or falsified.
Helen Keller
#46. The reality is that art has often risen to greater heights than the people who created it. Many flawed artists have created great works of art. You have to decide if you are going to listen to Richard Wagner's music or not because he was very anti-Semitic.
Gavin Hood
#47. All great works start with mistake. Ain't no exception in this fact.
Sandra Newman
#48. Until one expands his imagination, abilities and capacity to do and receive, he will always have the crumbs from those who dare to do great works
Bernard Kelvin Clive
#49. Frustrated love has been the incentive for many great works.
John N. Mitchell
#51. It is not just the Great Works of mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it.
Laurie Colwin
#52. The great minds, the great works transcend all limitations of time, of language, and of race, and the scholar can never feel initiated into the company of the elect until he can approach all of life's problems from the cosmopolitan standpoint.
William Osler
#53. Words are like shards of glass. By themselves they're worthless; however, when placed together in just the right way, they can become great works of art.
Leigh M. Lane
#54. You do need prayer, more than you know, ' Carita said softly. 'Prayer is the keynote. Prayer isn't the preparation to accomplish the purposes of Adon Olam. It is the accomplishment of His purposes. Great works are done through prayer.
Erika Mathews
#56. Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed to immutable.
Azar Nafisi
#57. Keep alive within you and bring under wise control that courage which makes you long to undertake great works, which others might consider it folly to attempt.
Mary Euphrasia Pelletier
#58. Great works are performed, not by strength, but by perseverance. Those that walk with vigor, three hours a day, will pass in seven years a space equal to the circumference of the globe.
Samuel Johnson
#59. The true democrat wishes to share the great works of culture with all who are able to appreciate them; the egalitarian, recognizing that genuine excellence is rare, declares greatness a fraud and sets about obliterating distinctions.
Roger Kimball
#60. Art begins where technique ends. There can be no real art development before one's technique is firmly established. And a great deal of technical work has to be done before the great works of violin literature, the sonatas and concertos, may be approached.
Leopold Auer
#61. I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908)
Auguste Rodin
#62. I feel genius in great works of art. I have seen medical cures that science can't explain, some seemingly triggered by faith. The same is true of millions of other people.
Deepak Chopra
#63. For while agents and editors often misunderstand their market and sometimes reject good or even great works, they do prevent a vast quantity of truly execrable writing from being published.
Laura Miller
#64. I would predicate that in all great works of genius masculine and feminine elements in the personality find expression, whether this androgynous nature is played out sexually or not.
May Sarton
#65. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our own spontaneous expression with good humored inflexibility whether the whole cry of voices is on the other side.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#66. We were called, male and female, to do great works with separate approaches and separate assignments.
James E. Faust
#67. Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.
Marcel Proust
#68. History's best thinkers eventually concluded that our flaws were too powerful to trust with freedom. Thus we've been groomed as hamsters in a wheel that benefits a laughing few. No more great works will be accomplished under the regime, because beauty is not democratic or profitable.
D.B.C. Pierre
#69. Ambition has developed into a passion which drives women, as well as men, to great works - and small deeds. Formerly competitors in the race for men, they are now competing in the race for social tasks and distinctions.
Ellen Key
#70. All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
Charles J. Shields
#71. I think that China has many outstanding authors, and their great works should also be recognised by the world.
Mo Yan
#72. As with all great works of literature, 'Of Mice and Men' moves with the inexorability of a huge river, and it pours itself, exhausts itself, in the sea of our unconscious. Having read it, we carry the book inside us forever.
Jay Parini
#73. Could we have entered into the mind of Sir Isaac Newton, and have traced all the steps by which he produced his great works, we might see nothing very extraordinary in the process.
Joseph Priestley
#74. even the Pyramids and other "great works" were as ephemeral as a castle of sand on the beach at Brighton.
Dan Simmons
#75. Our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding.
Helen Keller
#76. And did not Spinoza's refusing to flee from excommunication by his church and community mean the same inner battle of integrity, the same struggle for the power not to be afraid of aloneness, without which the noble Ethics, certainly one of the great works of all time, could not have been written?
Rollo May
#77. Whatever the practical origins of aesthetic discernment may have been, it has been used to create great works of art. When the very loftiest human creations are seen to derive from humble origins and functions, what needs revision is not our esteem for these creations but our notion of nobility.
Robert Nozick
#78. The defense of the great works of Western literature can no longer be undertaken by central institutional power though it is hard to see how the normal operation of learned institutions, including recruitment can manage without them.
Harold Bloom
#79. Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.
Joseph Joubert
#81. The American classicist Edith Hamilton once described the great works of literature, the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.
Edith Hamilton
#82. What is truth? What is falsehood? Whatever gives wings to men, whatever produces great works and great souls and lifts up a man's height above the earth - that's true. Whatever clips off man's wings - that's false.
Nikos Kazantzakis
#83. It might be argued that genuine spontaneity is not really possible or desirable so long as printed scores of great works exist. All modern musicians are, for better or worse, prisoners of Gutenberg.
Donal Henahan
#84. Many great works of art, poetry, and music are inspired by astral memories. The desire to do noble, beautiful things here on Earth is also often a carryover of astral experiences between a person's earth lives.
Paramahansa Yogananda
#85. My mother was a Bloomsbury figure: a great friend of TS Eliot, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell. My grandmother, Mary Hutchinson, gave her life to works of art, being an admirer of Matisse and Giaometti, whom I collected as a young man because of her.
Jacob Rothschild
#86. You think you have this great idea that everyone's going to come join, but that's not how it works.
Sam Altman
#87. It is not reasonable that art should win the place of honor over our great and powerful mother Nature. We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of her works by our inventions that we have quite smothered her.
Michel De Montaigne
#88. I am a great and sublime fool. But then I am God's fool, and all His works must be contemplated with respect.
Mark Twain
#89. God's great love and purposes for us are all worked out in messes in our kitchens and backyards, in storms and sins, blue skies, the daily work and dreams of our common lives. God works with us as we are and not as we should be or think we should be.
Eugene H. Peterson
#90. GPS works great. I recommend it for all cat owners who want to know what their cats do when they're not there, if you can stand the ridicule from your friends.
Caroline Paul
#91. I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.
Harold Bloom
#92. 2PE3.10 But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that
Anonymous
#93. Recently, the Germans have developed a tendency to prefer the so-called first (youthful) style of great artists to their mature works. Could it be that they do not realize that their aesthetic criteria, generally speaking, are juvenile?
Franz Grillparzer
#94. I think the kick to doing comedy is just to get in a film with really funny people and let them do their jobs. I find that in most comedies, I'm not the funny one, which works out great.
Amy Adams
#95. Talking with other artists is an incredible process. You engage with the work very differently ... a nd different relationships between different works start to emerge. To tap into that energy-to tap into that moment-is great for me as an exercise.
Shahzia Sikander
#96. I think of great masters, like [Alfred] Hitchcock, for example, who works absolutely within this sensational realm. You feel like you can always tell what temperature a room is in a Hitchcock film because the people feel alive, they don't feel like they're just being filmed on a stage.
Tilda Swinton
#97. In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read - and they have been many, big, and heavy - I don't remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#98. I've got Flossie dog, and she is great. She and I are still in love, 14 years. That's a relationship that works.
Drew Barrymore
#99. Freedom from militarism will give the German people the opportunity, if they will but seize it, to apply their great energies and abilities to the works of peace.
James F. Byrnes
#100. If we study Nature attentively in its great evolutions as in its minutest works, we cannot fail to recognize the possibility of enchantment - giving to that word its exact significance.
Honore De Balzac
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