Quotes About Craftsmanship

The excellence of every art, must consist in the complete accomplishment of its purpose

To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.

I have a lot of experience with making fake helmets out of foil.

It is the old experience that a rude instrument in the hand of a master craftsman will achieve more than the finest tool wielded by the uninspired journeyman.

Experience is an author's most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.

Doing designs on a loom takes a lot of talent and experience, and, trust me, I won't be able to do that.

If you don't have experience sewing, start with that, because that will inform what you are able to design.

At the root of many a woman's failure to become a great cook lies her failure to develop a workmanlike regard for knives.

Test every work of intellect or faith and everything that your own hands have wrought.

Perfection - not a big thing but a combination of many small things.

I would not go on anymore weaving my cloths by day and unraveling them again at night, making nothing.

It was a little like spell-work, I thought, for your hands must be busy, and your mind sharp and free.

Una barca ben costruita, un albero ben cresciuto, una storia ben raccontata, tutti questi per lui erano piaceri.

Quand les sculpteurs façonnent leur pierre, ils le font d'après lui.

It wasn't my only gift. I had found a seasoned piece of ash and began to fashion it secretly, carving off its soft layers. Over nearly two months a shape had emerged—a boy playing the lyre, head raised to the sky, mouth open, as if he were singing. I had it with me now, as I walked.

She has always had a secret liking for this part of the embroidery, the 'wrong' side, congested with knots, striations of silk and twists of thread. How much more interesting it is, with its frank display of the labour needed to attain the perfection of the finished piece.

How much more interesting it is, with its frank display of the labour needed to attain the perfection of the finished piece.

Alice had a rare gift: she was a "nose." Her sense of smell was so acute that she could distinguish and memorize the slightest odor. She spent her days alone, bent over the long wooden table in her flat, blending different essences to obtain combinations that might one day become a perfume. Every month she made the rounds of the London perfume shops, offering them her new creations.

it was produced on an industrial scale, turned on potter's wheels and fired in high-temperature kilns,

Well, I never studied design and I went to art school to study art, you know, sculpture and things like that, and ended up making things like sculpture and started making chairs and jewelry together and that's how I started.

Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort. There must be the will to produce a superior thing.

There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man's lawful prey.

It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.