Master Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Master, Master of Light,
Whose eye dwells in the seeking fingers of the blind,
You are still despised and mocked,
A man too weak and infirm to be God,
A God too much man to call forth adoration.

And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame;
And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,
But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They Are!

Rudyard Kipling

The man who listens to Reason is lost: Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.

George Bernard Shaw

Our character is composed of our ideas and our feelings: and, since it has been proved that we give ourselves neither feelings nor ideas, our character does not depend on us. If it did depend on us, there is nobody who would not be perfect. If one does not reflect, one thinks oneself master of everything; but when one does reflect, one realizes that one is master of nothing

Make yourself a master of perspective, then acquire perfect knowledge of the proportions of men and other animals.

Leonardo da Vinci

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Aristotle and Plato considered Greeks so innately superior to barbarians that slavery is justified so long as the master is Greek and the slave barbarian.

Bertrand Russell

During the century after Newton, it was still possible for a man of unusual attainments to master all fields of scientific knowledge. But by 1800, this had become entirely impracticable.

A prince ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else for his study, than war and its rules and discipline; for this is the sole art that belongs to him who rules, and it is of such force that it not only upholds those who are born princes, but it often enables men to rise from a private station to that rank. And, on the contrary, it is seen that when princes have thought more of ease than of arms they have lost their states. And the first cause of your losing it is to neglect this art; and what enables you to acquire a state is to be master of the art.

Niccolò Machiavelli

For we have thought the longer thoughts And gone the shorter way. And we have danced to devils' tunes, Shivering home to pray; To serve one master in the night, Another in the day.

Ernest Hemingway

What is it, in your opinion, to be a great nobleman? It is to be master of several objects that men covet, and thus to be able to satisfy the wants and the desires of many. It is these wants and these desires that attract them towards you, and that make them submit to you: were it not for these, they would not even look at you; but they hope, by these services... to obtain from you some part of the good which they desire, and of which they see that you have the disposal.

There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys; they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves.

Søren Kierkegaard

We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.

William Shakespeare

I've seen people at Madame Tussaud's as lively as my new master!

The ulterior motives with which you absorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil.
The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master, not knowing that this is only a fantasy produced by a new knot in the master's whiplash.

Naturally, it is with some temerity that the pupil speaks before the master, because you know more about the Common Market than anybody.

Margaret Thatcher

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of the workman. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.

In the fury of the moment/ I can see the Master's hand In every leaf that trembles, in/ every grain of sand.

How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in furnaces? Praised be Thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar?

I am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference; it can never give me a pang. There are subtleties which I cannot master at all — they confuse me, they mean absolutely nothing to me — and this adverb plague is one of them.

Let us be masters of the Channel for six hours, and we are masters of the world.

Napoleon I of France

Whatever be the subject of a speech, therefore, in whatever art or branch of science, the orator, if he has made himself master of it, as of his client's case, will speak on it better and more elegantly than even the very originator and author of it can.

Lear: Dost thou know me, fellow?
Kent: No, sir, but you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master.
Lear: What's that?
Kent: Authority.

William Shakespeare

In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.

Charles de Gaulle

Whoever enters the Way without a guide
will take a hundred years to travel a two-day journey.
The Prophet said "In this way you have no more
faithful companion than your works."
How can these works and this earning in the way of righteousness
be accomplished without a master, O father? Can you practice the meanest profession in the world
without a master's guidance?
Whoever undertakes a profession without a master
becomes the laughingstock of city and town.