Quotes about masterpiece (149 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

Beauty

“Be true to yourself.
Make each day your masterpiece.
Help others.
Drink deeply from good books.
Make friendship a fine art.
Build a shelter against a rainy day.
Pray for guidance and give thanks for your blessings every day.”

John Wooden (1910–2010) American basketball coach

Friendship , Books , Art , Drink

“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 (1960) Author, actor, professional speaker

Love , Life , People , Fear

“I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. You abandon your masterpiece and sink into the real masterpiece.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

“Nature's great masterpiece, an elephant;
the only harmless great thing.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

Nature

“Hammurabi's Code cannot by any means be regarded as a faltering attempt to frame laws among a young and inexperienced people. Such a masterpiece of legislation could befit only a thriving and well-organized nation, given to agriculture and commerce, long since grown familiar with the security afforded by written deeds drawn up with all the niceties and solemnities which clever jurists could devise, and accustomed to transact no business otherwise. It is inspired throughout by an appreciation of the right and humane sentiments that make it surpass by far the stern old Roman law.”

Hammurabi (-1810–-1750 BC) sixth king of Babylon

Charles L. Souvay, The Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), Volume VII.
About

People , Law , Business

“Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.”

William Shakespeare Macbeth

Source: Macbeth

“Time is the brush of God, as he paints his masterpiece on the heart of humanity.”

Ravi Zacharias (1946) Indian philosopher

God , Time , Heart , Painting

“Masterpieces are only lucky attempts.”

George Sand (1804–1876) French novelist and memoirist; pseudonym of Lucile Aurore Dupin

Les chefs-d'oeuvre ne sont jamais que des tentatives heureuses.
François le Champi, Introduction; Jane Minot Sedgwick (trans.) François the Waif (New York: H. M. Caldwell, 1894) p. 24

“The heart of a father is the masterpiece of nature. ”

Antoine François Prévost (1697–1763) French novelist

Father's Day , For Parents , For Father , Nature

“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Variant: Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
Source: Lolita

Life

“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 (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings

Women

“For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

People , Birth , Thinking

“If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Source: Pale Fire

Life , Understanding , Sense

“The smallest feline is a masterpiece.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

“Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.”

Marcel Proust book In Search of Lost Time

Tout ce que nous connaissons de grand nous vient des nerveux. Ce sont eux et non pas d'autres qui ont fondé les religions et composé les chefs-d'œuvre.
http://books.google.com/books?id=qrZEAAAAYAAJ&q=%22Tout+ce+que+nous+connaissons+de+grand+nous+vient+des+nerveux.+Ce+sont+eux+et+non+pas+d'autres+qui+ont+fond%C3%A9+les+religions%22+%22et+compos%C3%A9+les+chefs-d'%C5%93uvre%22&pg=PA272#v=onepage
Volume I
In Search of Lost Time, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol III: The Guermantes Way (1920)

World , Religion

“Whitman’s masterpiece, his whole vision, is exactly about this: life as a quest for truth, love, beauty, goodness, and freedom; life as the art of becoming human through the cultivation of the human soul.”

Rob Riemen (1962) Dutch philosopher

Source: Nobility of Spirit : A Forgotten Ideal (2008), p. xxvii

Love , Life , Truth , Beauty

“One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses them and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror—for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Weird Tales editor Edwin Baird printed in Weird Tales 3, no. 3 (March 1924), pp. 89-92. Quoted in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 122
Non-Fiction, Letters

Imagination , Perfection

“Once settled, I hope to produce masterpieces, because I like the countryside very much.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

in a letter to Paul Durand-Ruel: as quoted in: Daniel Wildensteijn "Monet's Giveny" in: Monet's Years at Giverny: Beyond Impressionism http://books.google.nl/books?id=H76Nl_fNgOUC, (1978) p. 16: About the countryside in Giverny
1870 - 1890

Hope

“Even Morgan seems to me to be based on some hidden rock. Talking of Proust and Lawrence he said he'd prefer to be Lawrence; but much rather would be himself. He is aloof, serene, a snob, he says, reading masterpieces only.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Tuesday 18 September 1923
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

Reading

“To-day we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed.”

Oswald Spengler book The Decline of the West

Vol. II, Alfred A. Knopf, 1928, p. 461 https://archive.org/stream/Decline-Of-The-West-Oswald-Spengler/Decline_Of_The_West#page/n931/mode/2up
The Decline of the West (1918, 1923)

Sense , Freedom

“He wants to live on through something — and in his case, his masterpiece is his son… all of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world.”

Arthur Miller (1915–2005) playwright from the United States

On Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, as quoted in The New York Times (9 May 1984)

World

“Constantine was Nature's masterpiece, a triumph, as it were, of God's handiwork. One look at him would convince anyone that here was a descendant of the mythical Golden Age of the Greeks, so infinite was his charm.”

Anna Comnena book Alexiad

Of Constantine Doukas
The Alexiad, Book 1

God , Age , Nature

“The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture for wild beasts to fight in.”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

Les anciens Romains élevaient des prodiges d'architecture pour faire combattre des bêtes.
Letter addressed to "un premier commis" [name unknown] (20 June 1733), from Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire: Correspondance [Garnier frères, Paris, 1880], vol. I, letter # 343 (p. 354)
Citas

Fight

“To understand life, and love it to its depths in a living being, that is the being's task, and that his masterpiece”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XXIII - Face To Face
Context: To understand life, and love it to its depths in a living being, that is the being's task, and that his masterpiece; and each of us can hardly occupy his time so greatly as with one other; we have only one true neighbor down here.

Love , Life , Understanding

“The cult of the masterpieces of art and thought is the only impulse of the soul which, by general consent, has always soared above patriotic littlenesses.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XX The Cult
Context: If, from the idea of motherland, you take away covetousness, hatred, envy and vainglory; if you take away from it the desire for predominance by violence, what is there left of it?
It is not an individual unity of laws; for just laws have no colors. It is not a solidarity of interests, for there are no material national interests — or they are not honest. It is not a unity of race; for the map of the countries is not the map of the races. What is there left?
There is left a restricted communion, deep and delightful; the affectionate and affecting attraction in the charm of a language — there is hardly more in the universe besides its languages which are foreigners — there is left a personal and delicate preference for certain forms of landscape, of monuments, of talent. And even this radiance has its limits. The cult of the masterpieces of art and thought is the only impulse of the soul which, by general consent, has always soared above patriotic littlenesses.

Art , Soul

“Already there is uneasy hesitation in these castaways' discussion of their tragedy, in the huge masterpiece of destiny that they are roughly sketching.”

Henri Barbusse book Under Fire

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 24 - The Dawn
Context: Already there is uneasy hesitation in these castaways' discussion of their tragedy, in the huge masterpiece of destiny that they are roughly sketching. It is not only the peril and pain, the misery of the moment, whose endless beginning they see again. It is the enmity of circumstances and people against the truth, the accumulation of privilege and ignorance, of deafness and unwillingness, the taken sides, the savage conditions accepted, the immovable masses, the tangled lines.
And the dream of fumbling thought is continued in another vision, in which everlasting enemies emerge from the shadows of the past and stand forth in the stormy darkness of to-day.

“Sometimes I myself have been sublime, I myself have been a masterpiece. Sometimes my visions have been mingled with a thrill of evidence so strong and so creative that the whole room has quivered with it like a forest, and there have been moments, in truth, when the silence cried out.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVII
Context: Who shall compose the Bible of human desire, the terrible and simple Bible of that which drives us from life to life, the Bible of our doings, our goings, our original fall? Who will dare to tell everything, who will have the genius to see everything?
I believe in a lofty form of poetry, in the work in which beauty will be mingled with beliefs. The more incapable of it I feel myself, the more I believe it to be possible. The sad splendour with which certain memories of mine overwhelm me, shows me that it is possible. Sometimes I myself have been sublime, I myself have been a masterpiece. Sometimes my visions have been mingled with a thrill of evidence so strong and so creative that the whole room has quivered with it like a forest, and there have been moments, in truth, when the silence cried out.
But I have stolen all this, and I have profited by it, thanks to the shamelessness of the truth revealed. At the point in space in which, by accident, I found myself, I had only to open my eyes and to stretch out my mendicant hands to accomplish more than a dream, to accomplish almost a work.

Truth , Strong , Silence

“The Ramacharitamanas undoubtedly is the great poem worthy to rank among the great classical masterpieces of world literature.”

Tulsidas (1532–1623) Hindu poet-saint

Source: On Tulsidas’s epic Ramacharritamanas, P.E.Keay in "A Garden of Deeds: Ramacharitmanas, a Message of Human Ethics", p. 35

World , Literature

“You are the masterpiece
of your own life.
You are the Michelangelo
of your own life.
The David you are sculpturing
is you

(Dr. Joe Vitale)”

Rhonda Byrne book The Secret

Source: The Secret

Life

“Make every day your masterpiece.”

John Wooden (1910–2010) American basketball coach

Interview on Charlie Rose https://archive.org/details/WHUT_20100614_130000_Charlie_Rose (2000)
Source: Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court

“You grow up to become living proof of your parents' limitations. Their less-than masterpiece.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Rant

Source: Rant

Parent

“Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colour; their pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece.”

Kakuzo Okakura book The Book of Tea

Source: The Book of Tea

Sadness , Light , Joy

“The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and, which is surely the devil's masterpiece.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

Love , Fear , Angels , Nature

“The laws of physics is the canvas God laid down on which to paint his masterpiece”

Dan Brown book Angels & Demons

Source: Angels & Demons

God , Law , Painting

“The great and glorious masterpiece of man is to live with purpose.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

“The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Source: Le Potomak : Précédé d'un Prospectus 1916

Literature

“You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces - just good food from fresh ingredients.”

Julia Child (1921–2004) American chef

Food , Cooking

“The artist cannot look to others to validate his efforts or his calling. If you don't believe me, ask Van Gogh, who produced masterpiece after masterpiece and never found a buyer in his whole life.”

Steven Pressfield (1943) United States Marine

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

Life , Effort

“Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

People , Religion , Art , Thinking

“Every living thing is a masterpiece, written by nature and edited by evolution.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Nature

“Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919) American artist, writer and activist

Source: City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology

“Every masterpiece is just dirt and ash put together in some perfect way.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Diary

Source: Diary

Way , Perfection

“When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

Widely attributed on the Internet to John Ruskin; see this Google search https://www.google.com/search?num=50&q=%2B%22When+love+and+skill+work+together%2C+expect+a+masterpiece.%22+%2B%22John+Ruskin%22+-%22Charles+Reade%22&oq=%2B%22When+love+and+skill+work+together%2C+expect+a+masterpiece.%22+%2B%22John+Ruskin%22+-%22Charles+Reade%22&gs_l=serp.12...143064.148395.0.150598.2.2.0.0.0.0.108.196.1j1.2.0....0...1c.1.64.serp..0.0.0.JURsIFvRl34 for thousands of pages containing the quote AND "John Ruskin" but NOT "Charles Reade".

This is actually from Put Yourself in His Place by Charles Reade.
Misattributed

Success , Love

“The public will accept a masterpiece, but it will not accept an attempt to write a masterpiece.”

George Moore (novelist) (1852–1933) Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist

Vain Fortune http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11303/11303.txt, Chapter 1 (1891).

“Women are present as well as men in Shahnameh, the masterpiece of Ferdowsi.”

Chista Yasrebi (1968)

Outlooks
Source: Center for the Great Islamic Encyclopedia, 2014 https://www.cgie.org.ir/fa/news/11919

Women , Men

“I have seen here [in London] a play on Faust, the most diabolic thing imaginable. The Mephistopheles is a masterpiece of caricature and intelligence. It is Goethe's 'Faust', but adapted; the principle features are preserved. They have made it into an opera mixed with comedy and with everything that is most sombre. The scene in the church is given with the priest's chanting and the organ in the distance. Impossible to carry an effect further, in the theater.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote in a letter (written in London, England) to J. B. Pierret, 18 June 1825; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 67
1815 - 1830

Imagination , Intelligence

“Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet, as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Letter to artists, 4 April 1999
Source: Libreria Editrice Vaticana http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_23041999_artists_en.html

Life , Women , Men , Art

“The offer to direct an animated version of Blue Dragon came in February of last year [2006]. Studio Pierrot approached me regarding it. I knew that Sakaguchi had been working on assembling staff to produce a game, although at the time Blue Dragon hadn't yet been formally announced. According to the materials, it was to be a fantasy world like Lord of the Rings, with a detailed world view and story. This may be my final anime, I'm a little worried (about it). There's incredible pressure, but at the same time, there's a sense of accomplishment — that it's worth doing. Blue Dragon will be a masterpiece, not simply because I'm working hard on it, but because the staff is expecting nothing less.”

Akira Toriyama (1955) manga artist and video game character designer

Last anime?

World , Game , Sense , Time

“Another great writer who led me on It this stage was Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. I had read all his novels but had never been able to understand why he had been honoured as a rishi. I myself was a novelist and had already written several humane stories. I thought that a novelist dealt with the dimensions of human character and mapped the heights it could scale and the depths to which it could sink. Why should we foist the title of a rishi on this poor fellow? That way rishis will be available a dime a dozen. My doubts about Bankim Chandra being a rishi were removed when I read the second volume of his Collected Works in Bengali. His insights into the innermost core of Hindu culture were a revelation. His Ramayaner Alochona made me see the monstrosities of modern Indology, more than ever before. I immediately translated this masterpiece into Hindi.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

How I became a Hindu (1982)

Way , Understanding , Reading

“It was Italian playwright and screenwriter Ennio Flaiano who first spoke to Fellini of Fernando Pessoa during their collaboration on I Vitelloni (1953). Fellini claimed, however, that it was not until he lunched with Anthony Burgess in the mid 1970s (when the British writer owned a country house in Bracciano north of Rome) that he began reading the Portuguese poet in earnest. This is not to suggest that Pessoa influenced Fellini in any direct way but simply to note a genial coincidence embedded within two autobiographical masterpieces. The first quotation is from Pessoa’s O Livro do desassossego: ‘These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it’s because I have nothing to say.’ The second is from Fellini’s Otto e mezzo (1963) during the crucial night scene at the base of the scaffolding when Guido confesses to Rosella, “I have really nothing to say in my film. But I want to say it anyway.” Suddenly, the disparate obsessions of these two great Mediterranean minds seem to fold into one another, if only for an instant, like the sounds of vibrating wires touched simultaneously. Whatever the ultimate significance may be, it amuses me to think that textual coincidences of this nature are proof of the brotherhood of artists.”

Damian Pettigrew Canadian filmmaker

On Fellini and Fernando Pessoa
Federico Fellini: Sou um Grande Mentiroso (2008)

Way , Nature , Thinking , Reading

“Now color — it is to this remark that I wished to lead — is the flower of fine modelling. These two qualities always accompany each other, and it is these qualities which give to every masterpiece of the sculptor the radiant appearance of living flesh.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. III. Modelling, p. 61

Color , Flowers , Appearance

“The good critic is one who tells of his mind's adventures among masterpieces.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

Le bon critique est celui qui raconte les aventures de son âme au milieu des chefs-d'œuvre.
Series II : M. Jules Lemaître
The Literary Life (1888-1892)

“Lenin is an artist who has worked men, as other artists have worked marble or metals. But men are harder than stone and less malleable than iron. There is no masterpiece. The artist has failed. The task was superior to his capacities.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

Popolo d'Italia (14 July 1920) "The Artificer and the Material," quoted in Mussolini in the Making (1938) by Gaudens Megaro, p. 326
1920s

Men

“Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.”

George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham (1628–1687) English statesman and poet

John Sheffield, 1st Duke of Buckingham and Normanby "An Essay on Poetry", line 2; cited from The Poetical Works of the Most Noble John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham (Edinburg [sic]: Apollo Press, 1780) p. 281.
Misattributed in Temple Bar (February 1863) p. 377, and by Giga Quotes http://www.giga-usa.com/quotes/authors/george_villiers_a001.htm.
Misattributed

Nature

“The Phantom Menace is not a masterpiece, but it's an example of how imagination, craftsmanship, and technological bravura can fashion superior entertainment out of something that is far from flawless.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/movies/s/sw99.html of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999).
Three-and-a-half star reviews

Imagination , Fashion

“To show this later progress in my own work I refer to my [paintings] 'Organ-playing monk', in 1850, my 'Lord's Supper in the Geestes-kerk (church) in Utrecht' in 1852, and my 'Bakenesse-kerk (church) in Haarlem', painted a dozen years later. All three can be found in the museum Fodor and can thus be compared to each other. The preference will undoubtedly be given to the latter, which for its strength and unity is counted among the masterpieces of this [Fodor] collection.”

Johannes Bosboom (1817–1891) Dutch painter

version in original Dutch (citaat van Johannes Bosboom, in Nederlands): Om dien lateren vooruitgang in mijn eigen werk te toonen, verwijs ik naar mijn [werken] 'Orgelspelende monnik' in 1850, mijn 'Avondmaalsviering in de Geesteskerk te Utrecht' in 1852 en mijn 'Bakenessekerk te Haarlem', een tiental jaren later geschilderd - alle drie in het museum Fodor te vinden en dus onderling te vergelijken. De voorkeur zal ongetwijfeld aan het laatste worden toegekend, dat om zijn kracht en éénheid tot de meesterstukjes dezer verzameling gerekend wordt.
Quote of Bosboom, in his autobiography, c. 1890; as cited in De Hollandsche Schilderkunst in de Negentiende Eeuw, G. H. Marius; https://ia800204.us.archive.org/31/items/dehollandschesch00mariuoft/dehollandschesch00mariuoft.pdf Martinus Nijhoff, s-’Gravenhage / The Hague, tweede druk, 1920, pp. 108-09 (translation from the original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)
1890's

Painting

“No masterpieces in huge frames to worship,
… and yet there are the days
when every street corner rounds itself into
a sunlit surprise, a painting or a phrase,
canoes drawn up by the market, the harbour’s blue,
the barracks. So much to do still, all of it praise.”

Derek Walcott (1930–2017) Saint Lucian–Trinidadian poet and playwright

"A Far Cry from Africa" (1962), White Egrets

Painting

“"All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare." These words which bring to a close Spinoza's masterpiece Ethics, after the manner of Geometry, sum up the experience of a life as rare as it was difficult.”

Edgar A. Singer, Jr. (1873–1954) American philosopher

Source: Modern thinkers and present problems, (1923), p. 37: Chapter 2. Benedict de Spinoza, 1632-1677

Life

“Like me, for instance, who can count so many years in my life when I completely lost all inclination to laugh, leaving aside whether or not this was my own fault, I for one need above all just to have a good laugh. I found that in Guy de Maupassant and there are others here, Rabelais among the old writers, Henri Rochefort among today's, where one can find that — Voltaire in 'Candide'. On the contrary, if one wants truth, life as it is, De Goncourt, for example, in 'Germinie Lacerteux', 'La fille Elisa', Zola in 'La joie de vivre' and 'L'assommoir' and so many other masterpieces paint life as we feel it ourselves and thus satisfy that need which we have, that people tell us the truth. The work of the French naturalists Zola, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, De Goncourt, Richepin, Daudet, Huysmans is magnificent and one can scarcely be said to belong to one's time if one isn't familiar with them.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote of Vincent, in his letter to sister Willemien van Gogh, from Paris, late October 1887; from letter 574 - original text on vangoghletters online http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let574/letter.html
1880s, 1887

Life , People , Truth , Guy

“.. I will endeavour to make clear to men of good will what the word 'material' means with regard to painting and that, without the material substance of paint, a painting is not a work of art but merely a decorative object, or rather, if it deals with an invented painting, the value of the image resides in its spiritual content.
In order to be a work of art, a painting must be very well painted and the good quality of the paint depends completely on the material substance of the paint with which it is executed. This matter, which constitutes the substance of painting, is composed of two elements which are equally important and absolutely inseparable: physical substance and metaphysical substance. These two elements complete each other reciprocally and when they are of a superior quality, create a masterpiece by way of their absolute harmony.”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

Quote from De Cirico's text 'A DISCOURSE ON THE MATERIAL SUBSTANCE OF PAINT', 1942 http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/541-547Metafisica5_6.pdf, p. 542
1920s and later

Men , Art , Way , Painting

“We have reached the bottom of the 9th inning, and now it is happening, what we normally experience at any ballpark when a visiting pitcher is so close to greatness, even the hometown fans come to root for him. He has come too far, he has journeyed too long to drop it.
(With 2 out) Chris Gwynn standing at the plate, Dennis Martinez delivers…Fastball hit JUST foul along the third base line. Foul by a foot, and now the crowd seems to be inspired. It's as if they take it as a sure sign that Dennis will get what he wants, and what he wants is suddenly what they want. 47,224 on their feet. One pitch away from a pitcher's absolute Nirvana. The pitcher's dream: A perfect game. Dennis Martinez ready, here's the pitch…Popped deep in the air to center field, going deep on it is Marquis Grissom, he's got it on the track!
(Crowd cheers)
Dennis Martinez getting mobbed by his teammates on this 28th of July, 1991, 3:22 pm in the afternoon. Dennis Martinez has reached the ultimate, a perfect game against the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Nothing scratchy, nothing flukey, it was a masterpiece! And with tears pouring down his cheeks, he goes down the steps and into the Expo dugout. What a game!”

Vin Scully (1927) American sports broadcaster

Dennis Martinez's perfect game at Dodger Stadium, July 28, 1991, based off of video on mlb.com

Dreams , Angels , Game , Tear

“No artist's masterpiece can match a mother's creation of a successful child, one who has been freed to explore and to grow. … Success is measured not only by who we are, but by what gifts we give. As the old chief said, "The gift is not complete until it is given again."”

Gerry Spence (1929) American lawyer

Ah, the mother whose gift to the world is a person!
Source: Give Me Liberty! (1998), Ch. 17 : Success Redefined, p. 194

World , Success , Personality

“Poetry is a religion without hope. The poet exhausts himself in its service, knowing that, in the long run, a masterpiece is nothing but the performance of a trained dog on very shaky ground.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Diary of an Unknown (1988), On Invisibility

Religion , Dogs , Hope , Training

“Blue Velvet contains scenes of such raw emotional energy that it's easy to understand why some critics have hailed it as a masterpiece. A film this painful and wounding has to be given special consideration. And yet those scenes of stark sexual despair are the tipoff to what's wrong with the movie. They're so strong that they deserve to be in a movie that is sincere, honest and true. But Blue Velvet surrounds them with a story that's marred by sophomoric satire and cheap shots. The director is either denying the strength of his material or trying to defuse it by pretending it's all part of a campy in-joke. … What's worse? Slapping somebody around, or standing back and finding the whole thing funny?”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/blue-velvet-1986 of Blue Velvet (19 September 1986)
Reviews, One-star reviews

Pain , Understanding , Strong , Parting

“Long ago I abandoned my masterpiece
a roll of paper thirty yards long
which I filled completely with minute handwriting
in my dungeon years ago
It vanished when the Bastille fell
it vanished as everything written
everything thought and planned
will disappear”

Peter Weiss Marat/Sade

Sade, act 2, scene 28 (p. 82)
Marat/Sade (1963)

“The natural hoof, like natural locomotion, is what nature has intended for the hooves of the modern horse. The natural shaped hoof found among wild horses in the outback is nothing less than a structural masterpiece; it has no rivals among domesticated horses anywhere.”

Jaime Jackson (1947) Horse hoof care professional

The Natural Horse (1997)

Nature , Horse

“A walk down 14th street is more amazing than any masterpiece of art.”

Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) American artist

[[http://streets2k5.albuscav.us/upstage_guide.pdfStreets 2K5 international festival Of Street Art (May 2005) p. 19

Art

“He uses his penis, scrotum and buttocks to create his masterpieces.”

Pricasso (1949) Australian painter

[The Star staff, Pricasso's the name, painting the game, 28 September 2012, 3, The Star, South Africa, Independent Online]
About

“Shall the painter then.... decide upon painting? Shall he be the critic and sole authority? Aggressive as is this supposition, I fear that, in the length of time, his assertion alone has established what even the gentleman of the quill accept as the canons of art, and recognize as the masterpieces of work. Seurat's painting of the Grande Jatte proved extremely influential.”

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American-born, British-based artist

quote of Whistler, (1892) In: Gentle Art of making Enemies, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1922, p. 30
1870 - 1903

Fear , Art , Time , Painting

“The symphony he wrote here in Vienna especially for me will be regarded as a masterpiece for centuries to come; believe me, there are few people who can compose something like that.”

Joseph Martin Kraus (1756–1792) German composer

People

“.. it is a masterpiece [painting of Barend Cornelis Koekkoek: 'View on the Woods' 1839, with sizes 176 x 160 cm], a well-executed brave undertaking to imagine something like that on a large scale with such an elaborateness. (translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)”

Willem Roelofs (1822–1897) Dutch painter and entomologist (1822-1897)

(original Dutch: citaat van Willem Roelofs, in het Nederlands:) ..het is een meesterstuk [groot schilderij van : 'Boschgezicht' 1839, 176 x 160 cm], een welgelukte stoute onderneming om op die schaal met die uitvoerigheid zooiets voor te stellen.
In a letter to his parents, August 1840; as cited by Marjan van Heteren in Willem Roelofs 1822-1897 De Adem der natuur, ed. Marjan van Heteren & Robert-Jan te Rijdt; Thoth, Bussum, - ISBN13 * 978 90 6868 4322, 2006, p. 23
1840' + 1850's

Imagination , Painting

“Martial force is the basis of all political virtues; in the rich treasure of Germany's glories the Prussian military glory is a jewel as precious, as loyally acquired as the masterpieces of our poets and our thinkers; the sacred character of the allegiance to the flag is a witness to the moral force of our people. Therefore let our Liberalism return to those ancient German convictions.”

Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896) Historian, political writer

Statement (1869), quoted in W. W. Coole (ed.), Thus Spake Germany (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1941), p. 59.

People

“It is an immortal masterpiece. Anybody and everybody today would, I should say, give the rest of their lives to have written it. Anyway I would.”

Edward German (1862–1936) English musician and composer

Dame Ethel Smyth, on Merrie England

“He's done two masterpieces, you don't have to bother with the rest. One is Blow-Up, which I've seen many times, and the other is La Notte, also a wonderful film, although that's mostly because of the young Jeanne Moreau. In my collection I have a copy of Il Grido, and damn what a boring movie it is. So devilishly sad, I mean. You know, Antonioni never really learned the trade… He concentrated on single images, never realising that film is a rhythmic flow of images, a movement. Sure, there are brilliant moments in his films. But I don't feel anything for L'Avventura, for example. Only indifference. I never understood why Antonioni was so incredibly applauded. And I thought his muse Monica Vitti was a terrible actress.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

On Michelangelo Antonioni
Variant translation: Antonioni has never properly learnt his craft. He's an aesthete. If, for example, he needs a certain kind of road for The Red Desert, then he gets the houses repainted on the damned street. That is the attitude of an aesthete. He took great care over a single shot, but didn't understand that a film is a rhythmic stream of images, a living, moving process; for him, on the contrary, it was such a shot, then another shot, then yet another. So, sure, there are some brilliant bits in his films... I can't understand why Antonioni is held in such high esteem.
Jan Aghed interview (2002)

Sadness , Feeling , Learning , Time

“We are now living in an age of literary exhaustion; we get used to the bleak landscape. Cyril Connolly said that the writer's business is to produce masterpieces; but what masterpieces have been produced in the past fifty years?”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Tree By Tolkien (1974), p. 11

Age , Business , Past

“I want to make my own life a masterpiece.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

Talks with Mussolini (1932), quoting earlier remarks
As quoted in " Duce (1922-42)" in TIME magazine (2 August 1943) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,777927-4,00.html
1930s
Variant: I shall make my own life a masterpiece.

Life

“The Man in the Moon is like a great short story, one of those masterpieces of language and mood where not one word is wrong, or unnecessary. It flows so smoothly from start to finish that it hardly even seems like an ordinary film. Usually I am aware of the screenwriter putting in obligatory scenes. I can hear the machinery grinding. Not this time. Although, in retrospect, I can see how carefully the plot was put together, how meticulously each event was prepared for, as I watched the film I was only aware of life passing by.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-man-in-the-moon-1991 of The Man in the Moon (4 October 1991)
Reviews, Four star reviews

Life , Mood , Time

“A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Art

Art

“I come to a performance of music that I know very well as if I were performing it for the first time. Every day is a new day, a new experience. This is the way I approach a masterpiece. A masterpiece can never age - it's only the people who perform it or listen to it who become insensitive to it. If you come with a fresh feeling toward a masterpiece, it will always feel fresh and give you the benefit of its genius.”

Lorin Maazel (1930–2014) French-American conductor

As quoted in Successories.com http://www.successories.com/iquote/author/14767/lorin-maazel-quotes/1

People , Age , Music , Way

“The masterpiece should appear as the flower to the painter—perfect in its bud as in its bloom - with no reason to explain it's presence - no mission to fulfill - a joy to the artist, a delusion to the philanthropist - a puzzle to the botanist - an accident of sentiment and alliteration to the literary man.”

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American-born, British-based artist

Propositions, 2
1870 - 1903, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies' (1890)

Flowers , Appearance , Joy , Perfection

“Don't you love it when people in school are like, "I'm a bad test taker?" You mean, you're stupid. Oh, you struggle with that part where we find out what you know? Oh. No, no, I can totally relate. See, because I'm a brilliant painter, minus my God-awful brushstrokes. Oh, how the masterpiece is crystal up here[points to head], but once paint hits canvas, I develop Parkinson's. I apologize if there's a Parkinson's painter in the audience. I assume your best work is in the A. M. Probably gets a bit abstract by noon.”

Daniel Tosh (1975) American stand-up comedian

Happy Thoughts (2011)

Love , God , People , Stupidity

“By the miracle of genius he created a masterpiece [Parzival], epic in scope, noble in purpose, humorous, humane, tender, and rational.”

Wolfram von Eschenbach (1170–1220) German knight and poet

Roger Sherman Loomis The Development of Arthurian Romance (New York: Dover, [1963] 2000) p. 67.
Criticism

“Today is yours to shape. Create a masterpiece!”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 61

“Zeno is one of the comic masterpieces of the century; as Svevo had previously used Flaubert more intelligently than any Italian before him, here he uses Freud in a way that no Italian has done since.”

Italo Svevo (1861–1928) Italian writer

Martin Seymour-Smith Guide to Modern World Literature (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975) vol. 3, p. 23.
Criticism

Way , Intelligence

“While man regards his body as a harp of pleasure to be played upon so long as its strings can be made to vibrate, so long will he continue to travel down the hill of physical decadence and degeneration in spite of quarantine laws and the most minute sanitary regulations. But when he recognizes his divine origin and obligations, and himself as the crowning masterpiece of creation, his body a precious thing, to be sacredly preserved, developed, expanded, and purified for service for humanity in this world, and a never-ending opportunity for development and joyous existence in the world to come, then only will he begin to climb toward the heights from which he has fallen, where he may once more stand forth as the crowning glory of creation, the masterpiece of God, “the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.””

John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) American physician

Source: The Living Temple, pp. 431-432

God , Pleasure , World , Law

“The anagram 'Avida Dollars' was a talisman for me [referring to 'Divine Dali', so called by André Breton ]. It rendered the rain of dollars fluid, sweet and monotonous. Someday I shall tell the whole truth about the way in which this blessed disorder of Danae was garnered. It will be a chapter of a new book, probably my masterpiece: On the Life of Salvador Dali, considered as a Work of Art”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

never written
Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 35

Life , Truth , Books , Art

“When Nature her great masterpiece designed,
And framed her last, best work, the human mind,
Her eye intent on all the wondrous plan,
She formed of various stuff the various Man.”

Robert Burns (1759–1796) Scottish poet and lyricist

To Robert Graham, st. 1 (1791)

Nature

“If I belong to a tradition, it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what to do, and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like, or the composer what he ought to have composed.”

Alfred Brendel (1931) Austrian pianist, poet, and author

Studs Terkel (2006). And They All Sang: The Great Musicians of the 20th Century Talk about Their Music. p. 287

“The enormous and half-educated publics of present-day England and America… acclaim as masterpieces books that are soon forgotten, while ignoring all that is exquisite and rare.”

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

“Fine Writing,” p. 308
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

Books , Education

“Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

J 249
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook J (1789)

“When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.”

Charles Reade (1814–1884) British writer

Source: Put Yourself in His Place (1870), CHAPTER V

Success , Love

“Although there are other heresies in The General Theory, along with puzzles, opacities, loose ends, confusions, errors, exaggerations, and anachronisms galore, they do not detract from the book's relevance to our present troubles. Economists may have forgotten The General Theory and moved on, but economics has not outgrown it, or the informal mode of argument that it exemplifies, which can illuminate nooks and crannies that are closed to mathematics. Keynes's masterpiece is many things, but "outdated" it is not.”

Richard A. Posner (1939) United States federal judge

How I Became a Keynesian (2009)

Books , Error , Mathematics

“Tell a dream, lose a reader, said Henry James. Joyce told a dream, Finnegans Wake, and he told it in puns - cornily but rightly regarded as the lowest form of wit. This showed fantastic courage, and fantastic introversion. The truth is Joyce didn't love the reader, as you need to do. Well, he gave us Ulysses, incontestably the central modernist masterpiece; it is impossible to conceive of any future novel that might give the form such a violent evolutionary lurch. You can't help wondering, though. Joyce could have been the most popular boy in school, the funniest, the cleverest, the kindest. He ended with a more ambiguous distinction: he became the teacher's pet.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Review of Ulysses, p. 446
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

Love , Truth , School , Dreams

“Transformers is so belabored that it makes Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End seem like a masterpiece of pacing. It makes that "classic" midsummer alien invasion movie, Independence Day, seem like a template for inventive plotting and solid character development. Even by Michael Bay standards, this movie is vapid. Yes, there are plenty of explosions, but those are a dime-a-dozen these days; even Discovery Channel's Mythbusters has them. Transformers isn't clean, big-budget fun; it's clean, big-budget tedium. For Transformers fans, I suppose this is a dream motion picture. For everyone else, it's a nightmare.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=591 of Transformers (2007).
One-and-a-half star reviews

World , Dreams

“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 (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

Source: Art & Other Serious Matters, (1985), p. 273, "Being Outside"

Art , Memory , Future , Personality

“If modern painters feel qualms about applying the term "masterpiece" to describe a work of capital importance, this is because it has come to convey a notion of perfection: a notion that leads to much confusion when applied to artists other than those who made perfection their ideal.”

André Malraux (1901–1976) French novelist, art theorist and politician

Part III, Chapter VI
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)

Feeling , Perfection

“Every bliss achieved is a masterpiece: the slightest error turns it awry, and it alters with one touch of doubt; any heaviness detracts from its charm, the least stupidity renders it dull.”

Marguerite Yourcenar book Memoirs of Hadrian

Tout bonheur est un chef-d'oeuvre: la moindre erreur le fausse, la moindre hésitation l'altère, la moindre lourdeur le dépare, la moindre sottise l'abêtit.
Source: Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), p. 164

Stupidity , Error

“The landscape painter, perhaps, goes even further. It is not only in living beings that he sees the reflection of the universal soul; it is in the trees, the bushes, the valleys, the hills. What to other men is only wood and earth appears to the great landscapist like the face of a great being. Corot saw kindness abroad in the trunks of the trees, in the grass of the fields, in the mirroring water of the lakes. But there Millet read suffering and resignation.
Everywhere the great artist hears spirit answer to his spirit. Where, then, can you find a more religious man?
Does not the sculptor perform his act of adoration when he perceives the majestic character of the forms that he studies? — when, from the midst of fleeting lines, he knows how to extricate the eternal type of each being? — when he seems to discern in the very breast of the divinity the immutable models on which all living creatures are moulded? Study, for example, the masterpieces of the Egyptian sculptors, either human or animal figures, and tell me if the accentuation of the essential lines does not produce the effect of a sacred hymn. Every artist who has the gift of generalizing forms, that is to say, of accenting their logic without depriving them of their living reality, provokes the same religious emotion; for he communicates to us the thrill he himself felt before the immortal verities.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Art, 1912, Ch. Mystery in Art

Men , Soul , Communication , Reality

“Our only means of original manifestation is to vomit these old masterpieces. Masterful spittle is our only opportunity to create within the Cinema our masterpieces. That's what Picasso stands for. He is a creator of deglutition and spittle, of old well-digested canvases.”

Isidore Isou (1925–2007) Romanian-born French poet, film critic and visual artist

Venom and Eternity (1951), Danielle's Monologue