Quotes About Craftsmanship

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

You can get away with a lot of shit if it looks like it`s all you know how to do.

The quality will remain when the price is forgotten.

Build me straight, O worthy Master!Staunch and strong, a goodly vessel.

a French dexterity combined with Italian acting.

The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.

I was always working steady, but I never called it art.

The smallest feline is a masterpiece.

María picked a thorn off the top of a maguey, made thread out of the sinews of the leaf, and told the maguey: 'Pardon me for taking your needle, pardon me for threading the needle with your body, pardon me for love, pardon me for I am what I am, and I do not know what this means.

Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist - whatever.

Finally, who can say of a crude, ill-decorated pot that it represents the end stage of a craft in decline rather than the first faltering steps of a new industry, or the fumbling of an apprentice in a mature stage of an established one, or even the blunder of a highly competent craftsman with a hangover?

You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing. I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they're made, they never seem quite as sacred again.

these were authentically coarse-woven curtains, woven by people who didn't know any other way of making curtains, who didn't even know that their way was special, and whose way was therefore not discounted and emptied of meaning in advance. This made him very happy. It was as if he'd been looking for these curtains forever, as if he'd been waiting his whole life to wake up one morning in a room in which those coarse-woven, stem-green curtains hung over the windows.

The Carpenter said nothing but"The butter's spread too thick!"

The point I am making is that if craftsmanship had not been condemned to death by starvation wages and meager profits, if it had, in fact, been protected and subsidized as so many of the new mechanical industries were in fact extravagantly subsidized, right down to the jet planes and rockets today, our technology as a whole, even that of 'fine technics' would have been immensely richer-and more efficient.

There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.

For a sculptor, a painter, a weaver, a potter, the dialogue between one's materials and what one makes from them is easy to see: discover a new material or a new way to use a familiar one, and new things can be made, sometimes leading to the discovery of more new material, leading to more creation.

A good use for me is to let me go away with my sewing machine and come back with some really new stuff.

Most ceramic plates, bowls, and cups have an unglazed rim around the very bottom, where the piece was in contact with the floor of the kiln. This unglazed ceramic is harder than metal and can be used just like a sharpening stone.

I am a maker of useful things.