Masterpiece Quotes - page 4

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)
While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw - that of outright unreadability. This reviewer should know, because he has just read it. The book bristles with beauties, charm, sublime comedy; it is also, for long stretches (approaching about 75 per cent of the whole), inhumanly dull.... Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 - the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right: not tears of relief but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do. View quote
Martin Amis
After leaving [the International Exposition in Paris, with a lot of new machines], I went to see Courbet's exhibition; he has reduced the admission to ten cents. I stay there alone for nearly an hour and discover that the picture [ 'L'atélier' / the Painter's Studio - 1855] of his which they refused [for exposing on the official Salon in Paris ] is a masterpiece; I simply could not tear myself away from the sight of it. View quote
Eugène Delacroix
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. View quote
Hammurabi
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. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
As for the Messiah, it is, like Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, one of those rare works that appeal immediately to everyone, and yet is indisputably a masterpiece of the highest order. View quote
Kenneth Clark
It is indeed strange that Indian critics should react to this novel so puritanically, forgetting the fact that a masterpiece of erotics i. e. Kama Sutra was produced by Vatsayana in the ancient days in India. Like all semi or fully pornographic novels, The Company of Women is widely sold, secret and publicly condemned. View quote
Vātsyāyana
Below us the Thames grew lighter, and all around below were the shadows - the dark shadows of buildings and bridges that formed the base of this dreadful masterpiece. View quote
Ernie Pyle
A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back. View quote
Virginia Woolf
The great and glorious masterpiece of man is to live with purpose. (Michel de Montaigne)
I decided then and there that the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms were the only music for me, not the music of this crazy Russian. ... My one desire was to flee that room and find a quiet corner in which to rest my aching head. Then Diaghilev turned to me and with a smile said, "This is a masterpiece, Monteux, which will completely revolutionize music and make you famous, because you are going to conduct it." View quote
Pierre Monteux
It is a masterpiece of the devil to make us believe that children cannot understand religion. Would Christ have made a child the standard of faith if He had known that it was not capable of understanding His words? View quote
Dwight L. Moody
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. View quote
Joseph Martin Kraus
All is so calm and chaste, so like a dream. That looking at this masterpiece of God, I ask myself Where is there a painter, an artist so supreme,So profoundly wise as to unfurl A canvas with a more arresting scene, More delicate and beautiful in this World? View quote
Florbela Espanca
A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. View quote
Richard Posner
There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling. View quote
Victor Hugo
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. View quote
Salvador Dalí
Respect the masterpiece. It is true reverence to man. There is no quality so great, none so much needed now. View quote
Frank Lloyd Wright
On August 8, 1944, when Himmler appointed SS General Kammler Commissioner General for the A-4 program, it looked as though the struggle for control had come to an end. I felt like a man who has devoted years of toil and affection to making a superb violin, a masterpiece which needs only tuning, and who then has to look on helplessly while the instrument is grabbed by a tough, unmusical woodman and scraped with a jagged lump of wood. (Walter Dornberger)
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. View quote
James Berardinelli
The public will accept a masterpiece, but it will not accept an attempt to write a masterpiece. View quote
George Moore (novelist)
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. View quote
Pope John Paul II
Even just a few spices or ethnic condiments that you can keep in your pantry can turn your mundane dishes into a culinary masterpiece. View quote
Marcus Samuelsson