Browsing Topic Best Great Work Quotes

Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don’t recognize them.

The harder I work the more I live.

Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and this is its whole secret.

Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a great deity. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.

Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.

The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.

Every great work of art … is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life.

We brought him [Raffi Torres] in because he was an emotional, physical player. He’s had nothing but a great attitude and a great work ethic with us all year long. He comes to play, prepares himself real well. We need him to play the way he does. You know, he’s a little bit sometimes outside the box, but you’ve got to let him be who he is.

Most of the great works of juvenile literature are subversive in one way or another: they express ideas and emotions not generally approved of or even recognized at the time; they make fun of honored figures and piously held beliefs; and they view social pretenses with clear-eyed directness, remarking – as in Andersen’s famous tale – that the emperor has no clothes.

We have great work ahead of us, and it needs devotion and much, much energy. To grow, to discover, we need involvement.

I’ve been very fortunate, because sometimes it’s difficult to work with your spouse. But in our case, it’s a great working relationship, and we have complementary skills which makes it easy to work together. So I’ve been very fortunate in that regard.

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.

I have tried to write songs quickly that get scrapped. I’ve also taken a long time on songs that get scrapped because you can over-think something, and you’ve squeezed the life out of it. As opposed to work of art, it looks like a really great work of craftsmanship.

I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908)

A good leader should focus on making sure everyone is being given the tools to do their job, not just expecting – poof! – that they’re going to produce great work.

When a man, a woman, see their little daily tasks as integral portions of the one great work, they are no longer drudges but co-workers with God.

Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.

[Director] Peter Wallerstein does great work rescuing sea life along the shores of LA, and I helped raise money for sanctuaries such as Chimp Haven, who are now taking in over two hundred medical lab chimps released from government-funded medical testing labs.

The Quest of the Holy Grail, the Search for the Stone of the Philosophers – by whatever name we choose to call the Great Work – is therefore endless. Success only opens up new avenues of brilliant possibility. Yea, verily, and Amen! the task is tireless and its joys without bounds; for the whole Universe, and all that in it is, what is it but the infinite playground of the Crowned and Conquering Child, of the insatiable, the innocent, the ever-rejoicing Heir of Space and Eternity, whose name is MAN?

We do not read in order to turn great works of fiction into simplistic replicas of our own realities, we read for the pure, sensual, and unadulterated pleasure of reading. And if we do so, our reward is the discovery of the many hidden layers within these works that do not merely reflect reality but reveal a spectrum of truths, thus intrinsically going against the grain of totalitarian mindsets.

I really think that everybody would like to be an actor. Why wouldn’t they? It’s great work if you can get it. The one thing that prevents most people from saying, ‘I’m just gonna go to Hollywood!’ is that it seems unrealistic.

Great readers, great listeners, and all have great work ethics. … They work hard at what they do and they’re devout to their reading and listening.

In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter.

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.

If I am practicing spiritual poverty, which says that I own nothing, then the problems aren’t mine and neither are the energy and compassion pouring through my heart to try to solve them. I am just a link in the process. If I don’t take anything personally, then I can do great work without flagging. The Dalai Lama once said, ‘Try with all your might – to work very, very hard – to make the world a better place, and if all your efforts are to no avail . . . no hard feelings!’

For no sooner had I begun to read this great work [Frasier, The Golden Bough ], than I became immersed in it and enslaved by it. I realized then that anthropology, as presented by Sir James Frazer, is a great science, worthy of as much devotion as any of her elder and more exact sister studies, and I became bound to the service of Frazerian anthropology.

An artist of understanding and experience can show more of his great power and art in small things roughly and rudely done, than many another in a great work. A man may often draw something with his pen on a half sheet of paper in one day . . . . and it shall be fuller of art and better than another’s great work whereon he hath spent a whole year’s careful labor.

No one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfillment.

Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.

There are no rhymes or reason, actually. Having said that, you know, cause there are people who are absolutely single-minded about their process and they can still come up with great work. But (what) I enjoy and it’s the same, I suppose, as I became more of a family man, I enjoy, I enjoy an atmosphere where it, you know, doesn’t have to be about conflict to get good results.

This is the great work of a man: always to take the blame for his own sins before God, and toexpect temptation to his last breath.

A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.

There are so many people with great work ethics that I’ve been around. I try and take the best qualities from the people I admire and apply it to my own self.

It is easy to believe that life is long and one’s gifts are vast — easy at the beginning, that is. But the limits of life grow more evident; it becomes clear that great work can be done rarely, if at all.

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?