Master Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul and that I am sure is why he does it.

Even the Quran, which Sufis respect as the direct speech of God, lacks the capacity to shed light upon God's essence. As one Sufi master has argued, why spend time reading a love letter (by which he means the Quran) in the presence of the Beloved who wrote it?

No man has a home unless he is master of a place where he must please no one — a place where he can go and lock the door behind him.

Do you know the famous last words of the Fatted Calf? 'I hear the young master has returned.'

Monja Danischewsky

That a man can change himself…and master his own destiny is the conclusion of every mind who is wide-awake to the power of right thought. (Christian D. Larson)

The guitar," I said, "will only obey its master." "Yeah," Cole agreed, "but Grace isn't here." He grinned at me slyly.

Maggie Stiefvater

Ack!" I said. Fearless master of the witty dialogue, that's me.

A victorious and powerful ally is but another name for a master.

It has been well said that the effective leader must know the meaning and master the techniques of the educator.

Philip Selznick

I think the true gardener is a lover of his flowers, not a critic of them. I think the true gardener is the reverent servant of Nature, not her truculent, wife-beating master. I think the true gardener, the older he grows, should more and more develop a humble, grateful and uncertain spirit.

Reginald Farrer

Self-discipline is the free man's yoke. Either he is his own master or he will be his own slave—not merely as slave to his passions, as an earlier generation might have feared, but a slave to his unbounded ego.

John W. Gardner

Whenever man attempts to do what he knows to be the Master's will, a power will be given him equal to the duty.

Fulton J. Sheen

Our eyes must be upon the Lord, not upon His people. His means – not ours, not theirs, but His means are large; and to a faithful steward He will prove a faithful master.

James Hudson Taylor

late news was suicide of Jan Masaryk - In my view, Jan Masaryk was thoroughly corrupt, who bumped himself off because he saw at last where his moral cowardice and ideological 'Playboyery' had led him. I vividly remember visiting him in Washington, fat, slightly tight, coming into the room looking like a broken-down butler with his master, the little Communist, Clementis, [-] and saying in a loud voice -'Has anyone seen an Iron Curtain? I haven't.' Well, he has now.

Malcolm Muggeridge

The ceiling fell? The ink ran dry? A student dared to smile?
Of every new disaster
I prove myself the master
By sending out more circulars, more circulars to file!
A missing kid? A kissing kid? A paper on the floor?
For every major crisis
One remedy suffices:
More circulars, more circulars, to put into a drawer! A crowded cafeteria?
A substitute's hysteria?
A visitor from Syria?
A missing Book Receipt? I merely send out circulars
To add to other circulars
To add to other circulars
Numerical and neat!

Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

My master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will. There is might in each.

The general systems movement has taken up the task of helping scientists unravel complexity, technologists to master it, and others to learn to live with it.

Gerald Weinberg

You conductors who are so proud of your power! When a new man faces the orchestra–from the way he walks up the steps to the podium and opens his score–before he even picks up his baton–we know whether he is the master or we.

Once at the croak of a Raven who crost it,
A barbarous people,
Blind to the magic,
And deaf to the melody,
Snarl'd at and cursed me.
A demon vext me,
The light retreated,
The landskip darken'd,
The melody deaden'd,
The Master whisper'd
'Follow The Gleam.'

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Only a few people are interested in what you have to say, but that is all right. You don't have to tell the quality of a master by the size of his crowds.

The virtue preached by devout persons is the virtue of the slave who always believe themselves under the eye of the master. However, Jesus said: 'Serve God not as slaves, but as sons in the house'

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun. You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it. Never suppose an inventing mind as source
Of this idea nor for that mind compose
A voluminous master folded in his fire.

Wallace Stevens

The civil servant is primarily the master of the short-term solution.

The Master was exceedingly gracious to university dons who visited him, but he would never reply to their questions or be drawn into their theological speculations. To his disciples, who marveled at this, he said, "Can one talk about the ocean to a frog in a well or about the divine to people who are restricted by their concepts?"

Anthony de Mello