Great Works Quotes

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.

Literature bores me, especially great literature

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.

Only a few things are worth a second reading—rarely are things of such enduring quality that they are read many times and live to inspire a second or third generation.

But can they [great works] get rid of the worm that lies gnawing at the roots of my heart? No, never.

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.

By being impatient, matters are damaged and great works cannot be done

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.

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.

There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

By adversity are wrought the greatest works of admiration, and all the fair examples of renown, out of distress and misery are grown.

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.

The problem of culture is seldom grasped correctly. The goal of a culture is not the greatest possible happiness of a people, noris it the unhindered development of all their talents; instead, culture shows itself in the correct proportion of these developments. Its aim points beyond earthly happiness: the production of great works is the aim of culture.

Great works of the imagination are not produced quickly nor do they take quick effect on the popular mind.

Thou shalt not let a day pass without rereading something great.

When God contemplates some great work, He begins it by the hand of some poor, weak, human creature, to whom He afterwards gives aid.

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.

After all, it is style alone by which posterity will judge of a great work, for an author can have nothing truly his own but his style.

To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life.

Enthusiasm is that secret and harmonious spirit which hovers over the production of genius, throwing the reader of a book, or the spectator of a statue, into the very ideal presence whence these works have really originated. A great work always leaves us in a state of musing.