The more books we read, the sooner we perceive that the only function of a writer isto producea masterpiece. No other task is of any consequence.

-Connolly, Cyril Vernon
  The Unquiet Grave, pt.1.

Nature's great masterpiece, an Elephant.

-Donne,John
c.1595^1605  'The Progress of the Soul', stanza 39, collected in Songs and Sonnets (1633).

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

-Emerson, RalphWaldo
Essays: First Series,'Friendship'.

In sculpture, did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoo«  n how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

-Emerson, RalphWaldo
the 1841  'Thoughts on  Art', in The Dial, vol.1, no.3,  Jan.

We sing the love of danger.Courage, rashness, and rebellion are the elements of our poetry. Hitherto literature has tended to exalt thoughtful immobility, ecstasy, and sleep, whereas we are for aggressive movement, febrile insomnia, mortal leaps, and blows with the fist.We proclaim that the world is richer for a new beautyof speed, and our praise isfor themanat the wheel. There is no beauty now save in struggle, no masterpiece can be anything but aggressive, and hence we glorify war, militarism and patriotism.

-Marinetti, Emilio FilippoTomasso
  Manifesto of Futurism. Quoted in Denis Mack Smith Italy:  A Modern History (1959), p.270.

Nostre grand et glorieux chef-d'½uvre, c'est vivre a' propos. The great and glorious masterpiece of man is to know how to live to purpose.

-Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de
  Essais, bk.3, ch.13 (translated by Charles Cotton).

Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure unfinished masterpiece.

-Nabokov,Vladimir
  Pale Fire,'Commentary'.

And no one knows, at first sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy. There's nothing in it.

-Pound, Ezra Loomis
 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,'MR NIXON'.

No one ever complains if a great artist says that he was driven to create a masterpiece by a hunger for recognition and money.But a scientist? Well, he ismeant to be disinterested, pure, his ambition merely to descry the cement of the universe. He isn't meant to use it to start laying his own patio.

-Self,Will
The QuantityTheory of Insanity and Five Supporting Propositions,'The QuantityTheory of Insanity'.

You have disgraced yourselves again.Youarerocking the cradle of a new masterpiece.

-Yeats,W(illiam) B(utler)
  Addressing the rioting audience at Dublin's AbbeyTheatre at the premi e' re of J M Synge'sThe Playboy of theWesternWorld.