Master Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

To undertake executions for the master executioner [Heaven] is like hewing wood for the master carpenter. Whoever undertakes to hew wood for the master carpenter rarely escapes injuring his own hands.

An ideal sanctified by the sacrifices of such master spirits as Lenin cannot go in vain, the noble example of their renunciation will be emblazoned for ever and quicken and purify the ideal as time passes.

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.

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.

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

Master, go on, and I will follow thee,
To the last gasp, with truth and loyalty.

William Shakespeare

We must not judge God from this world. It's just a study that didn't come off. It's only a master who could make such a blunder.

Vincent van Gogh

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

Napoleon I of France

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

Charles de Gaulle

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

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.

Think'st thou there is no tyranny but that Of blood and chains? The despotism of vice-- The weakness and the wickedness of luxury-- The negligence--the apathy--the evils Of sensual sloth--produces ten thousand tyrants, Whose delegated cruelty surpasses The worst acts of one energetic master, However harsh and hard in his own bearing.

A sailor's wife had chestnuts in her lap,
And munched, and munched, and munched: 'Give me,' quoth I:
'Aroint thee, witch!' the rump-fed runnion cries.
Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master o' the Tiger:
But in a sieve I'll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail,
I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do.

William Shakespeare

As a brother, a landlord, a master, she considered how many people's happiness were in his guardianship! — How much of pleasure or pain it was in his power to bestow! — How much of good or evil must be done by him!

The possibility has been established for the production of... a master race, the future "masters of the earth"... made to endure for millennia — a higher kind of men who... employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The master said, 'Quietly to store up knowledge in my mind, to learn without flagging, to teach without growing weary, these present me with no difficulties.'

A slave has but one master; an ambitious man has as many masters as there are people who may be useful in bettering his position.

Jean de La Bruyère

Love is a gracious host to his guests though to the unbidden his house is a mirage and a mockery.
Now you would have me explain the miracles of Jesus.
We are all the miraculous gesture of the moment; our Lord and Master was the centre of that moment.
Yet it was not in His desire that His gestures be known.

Love is your master, for he masters you;
And he that is so yoked by a fool
Methinks should not be chronicled for wise.

William Shakespeare

When Earth's last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried,
When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died,
We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it—lie down for an aeon or two,
Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew!

Rudyard Kipling