Quotes About Craftsmanship

Most folks use black ash. Hickory is so heavy, and birch warps more easily. But if you soak black ash and bend up the front, when it dries, it stays that way. Keep 'em well waxed and stored straight, and you got skis for a lifetime.

Art isn't about where it ends up. It's about the creation.

They applied pitch to fraying hemp, and repaired torn or stressed sails.

Less glamorous but equally necessary fields of specialization included carpenters, caulkers, and coopers.

I am a trained classical pianist. I can play all the masters. I can improvise on the piano, as well as play a variety of styles of music. Yet, I cannot build a piano. Is it necessary for me to know how to build a piano to be a good musician?

poetry is not—except in a very limited sense—a form of self-expression. Who on earth supposes that the pearl expresses the oyster?

A toothpick, inserted into a standard keyhole and snapped off flush, is a marvelous thing.

For Mia, Moody learned, did not consider herself a photographer. Photography, at its heart, was about documentation, and he soon understood that for Mia photography was simply a tool, which she used as a painter might use a brush or a knife.

Studying the work of masters is an essential part of becoming amaster.

Set your sights higher. Don't think of yourself as a programmer at a specific company—after all, it's not likely that you'll be at the same place forever—but as a participating member of an industry. You are a craftsperson or an artist. You have something to share beyond the expense-reporting application you're developing for your human resources department or the bugs you've got stacked up in your company's issue-tracking system.

To do a dull thing with style-now that's what I call art.

No Delicacy XIV. The Honest Tradesman XV. Knitting XVI. Still

Fellow of Delicacy XIII. The Fellow of No Delicacy XIV. The Honest Tradesman XV. Knitting XVI. Still

life is made of ever so many partings welded together, as I may say, and one man's a blacksmith, and one's a whitesmith, and one's a goldsmith, and one's a coppersmith.

The details are not the details. They make the design.

The one who bows into service is an artist. To see work as sacred is to bow into service to it, and thus become its instrument. More specifically and somewhat paradoxically, we become the instrument of that which we create.

Every job is a self-portrait of the person who does it. Autograph your work with excellence.

...but I assure you that there are moments when Art almost attains to the dignity of manual labor.

A quilt will warm your body and comfort your soul.

When life throws you scraps, make a quilt.

Don't needle the seamstress.

Grandma-quilts have love in every stitch.

A bed without a quilt is like a sky without stars.

Threads do not break for being fine, but for being gouty and ill-spun.