#masterpiece

We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the “intolerable compliment.” Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life—the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child—he will take endless trouble—and would doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#masterpiece #pain #art

Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece. ↗

— Nadia Boulanger

#cleaning #denied #lack #life #masterpiece

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

#composed #composer #i #like #makes

Introductions, that is, belong to the masterpieces and classics of the world, to the great and ancient and accepted things; and I am here introducing a short, small story of my own which appeared in The Evening News about ten months ago. ↗

— Arthur Machen

#accepted #ago #am #ancient #appeared

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

#case #get #gets #his #live

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. ↗

— Ernie Pyle

#base #below #bridges #buildings #dark

Today, you have the opportunity to transcend from a disempowered mindset of existence to an empowered reality of purpose-driven living. Today is a new day that has been handed to you for shaping. You have the tools, now get out there and create a masterpiece. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#disempowered #existence #inspirational #living #masterpiece

Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well. ↗

— Andre Breton

#chief #excel #masterpiece #nature #those

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

— Jean Cocteau

#greatest #literature #masterpiece #only #order

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

#births #body #common #experience #many