"Craftsmanship" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... any size desired without impairing distinctness of vision!" He wrinkled his brow and fell to making geometrical diagrams on the envelope, but neither his theoretical mathematics nor his practical craftsmanship could grapple with so obscure a request, and he forgot to eat while he pondered. He consulted his own treatise on the Rainbow, but to no avail. At length in despair he took up the last letter, to find a greater surprise awaiting him. A communication ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the subject solely from the latter standpoint (the point of view of ornamental design); and it will be useful to endeavour to trace the principles governing the selection of form and use of line as influenced by some of the different methods and conditions of craftsmanship, and as adapted ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... many years ago, the annual exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society. He remarked: "The true root and basis of all art lies in the handicrafts. If there is no room or chance of recognition for really artistic power and feeling in design and craftsmanship—if art is not recognised in the humblest object and material, and felt to be as valuable, in its own way, as the more highly rewarded pictorial skill—the art cannot be in a sound condition. And if artists cease to be found among the ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... these lines, possessing no small acquaintance with the world, have many a time seen church bells and figures of men wrought by the Enemy of Mankind—and the craftsmanship thereof admirable. Likewise have I had knowledge of children engendered in women by the Devil, but on this matter my tongue is tied by the obligation of secrecy binding on every Confessor. I will limit myself, therefore, ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... was upside down. The contumacious Pathans had quietly reversed the work of the ship's carpenter, and the hook was now useless without being ornamental. With bland ingenuous faces they stared sadly at the hook, as if deprecating such unintelligent craftsmanship. The Field-Marshal smiled—he knew the Pathan of old; the colonel mentally registered a ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... city would suggest a nomadic tradition, but for its craftsmanship. It seems independent of any obvious supply of food and their equivalent of water, if any. Nor were any provisions in evidence for the disposal of waste products. Yet the city had the appearance ...
— General Max Shorter • Kris Ottman Neville
... family were not able to make for themselves. The lack of colonial industries had the advantage of throwing each home upon its own resources, and the people developed great versatility in the cruder arts of craftsmanship. ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... things always learned an amazing lot from watching the deft, sure strokes of Harrietta's craftsmanship. She was kind to them, too. Encouraged them. Never hogged a scene that belonged to them. Never cut their lines. Never patronized them. They usually played ingenue parts, and their big line was that uttered on coming into a room looking for Harrietta. ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... has wrought his stanzas with greater faithfulness to an exacting standard of craftsmanship than Mr. Aldrich, or has known better when to leave a line loosely cast, and when to reinforce it with correction or with a syllable that might seem, to an ear less true, redundant. This gives to his most carefully chiseled productions an air of spontaneous ease, and has made him ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... three-dimensional works of fine, graphic, and applied art, photographs, prints and art reproductions, maps, globes, charts, diagrams, models, and technical drawings, including architectural plans. Such works shall include works of artistic craftsmanship insofar as their form but not their mechanical or utilitarian aspects are concerned; the design of a useful article, as defined in this section, shall be considered a pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work only if, and only ...
— Copyright Law of the United States of America and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code, Circular 92 • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.
... subject, and the closeness of the poet to this is therefore more obvious than in "literary" epic, which (again in response to surrounding needs) has been driven to take for subject some great abstract idea and display this in a concrete but only ostensible subject. Then in craftsmanship, the two kinds of epic are equally deliberate, equally concerned with careful art; but "literary" epic has been able to take such advantage of the habit of reading that, with the single exception of Homer, it has achieved a diction much ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... the jewelers, who perform miracles of craftsmanship in gold fliagree and in jade, are especially interesting, the sensitive-fingered artisans working at benches set in the windows in full view of passersby. The meat and fish stalls, the apothecaries, the cobblers who work on the sidewalks, the lily and the bird vendors, the telephone exchange where ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... 19th-century art manuals. The harmony of related parts—the balance of shaft and handle or the geometry of the twist—makes the auger a decorative object. This is not to say that the ancient woodworker's tool is not a document attesting a society's technical proficiency—ingenuity, craftsmanship, and productivity. It is only to suggest again that it is something more; a survival of the past whose intrinsic qualities permit it to stand alone as a bridge between the craftsman's hand and his work; an object of considerable appeal in which integrity ...
— Woodworking Tools 1600-1900 • Peter C. Welsh
... Guinevere, has given to the Anglo-Saxon world a new romantic background for its thoughts. The Idylls of the King are not Tennyson's most successful interpretation. The finest example of his superior short-story craftsmanship is seen in the triumphant use which he makes of the theme contained in The Book of Elaine, in his poem of The Lady of Shalott. Not only has he remodelled and added fantasy to the story, but he has threaded it through with ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... pronounced the same verdict? Had Amelia come between Joseph and Tom, how many of us might have committed ourselves to some such sentence as this: "In Amelia we see the youthful exuberances of Joseph Andrews corrected by a higher art; the adjustment of plot and character arranged with a fuller craftsmanship; the genius which was to find its fullest exemplification in Tom Jones already displaying maturity"? And do we not too often forget that a very short time—in fact, barely three years—passed between the appearance of Tom Jones and the appearance ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... another phenomenon: that of the artist endowed with all the powers of craftsmanship yet serving an end neither basically spiritual nor basically aesthetic, but definitely professional. We have George Vasari's word for it; and Vasari's blame upon the extravagant and too-well-beloved Lucrezia. To-day we are so accustomed ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... But we do not like George Minafer, and his final reconciliation with his own sweetheart and her father—the man whom ho has prevented his mother from marrying—leaves us cold. But if the characters are unpleasing the craftsmanship of The Magnificent Ambersons is of Mr. BOOTH TARKINGTON'S best, and his description "of the decline and fall of a locally supreme dynasty of plutocrats before the hosts of the Goths and Huns of spawning industrialism is almost a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... multifariously agonised; and an aesthete may speculate as to how far such objects offend, in expression of blank misery and horror, against the canons of what is held to be artistically desirable. The nearest approach to them in human craftsmanship, and as regards Auffassung, are perhaps some little Japanese wood-carvings whose creators, labouring consciously, likewise overstepped the boundaries of the grotesque and indulged in nightmarish effects of line similar to those which the old Peruvians, all unconsciously, ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... society accordingly sold the communal property for $100,000 and removed to a site on the Wabash River, in Indiana, where, under the magic of their industry, the beautiful village of New Harmony arose in one year, and where many of their sturdy buildings still remain a testimony to their honest craftsmanship. Unfortunately, however, two pests appeared which they had not foreseen. Harassed by malaria and meddlesome neighbors, Father Rapp a third time sought a new Canaan. In 1825 he sold the entire site to Robert Owen, the British philanthropic socialist, and the Harmonists ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... the same community may produce, in one century, goods of greater aggregate value than it was able to produce in the century that went before it. But these goods, whose superior value is due to exceptional skill—or, as would commonly be said, to qualities of superior craftsmanship—though they form some of the most coveted articles of the wealth of the modern world, are not typical of it; and from the point of view of the majority, they are the part of it which is least important. The goods whose value is due to exceptional craftsmanship—such as an illuminated manuscript, ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... unaffected, and interesting story of good craftsmanship, showing imagination and insight, with ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... done much to revive dignity in Indian life. Offsetting dilettantism, the Museum of New Mexico and associated institutions and artists and other individuals have fostered Indian pottery, weaving, silversmithing, dancing, painting, and other arts and crafts. Superior craftsmanship can now depend upon a fairly reliable market; the taste of American buyers has ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... a modest, polite, cheerful, industrious, skilful, and in the best sense of the word artistic hereditary craftsmanship is proving only too easy a prey to the new industrial system. It is a sad reflection that the country which, owing to her long period of seclusion, had the opportunity of applying to all the things of common life so remarkable a skill and artistry, should ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... sore was the lesson! Hard was his life amongst them, for their thralls be not so well entreated as their draught-beasts, so many do they take in battle; for they are a mighty folk; and these thralls and those aforesaid unhappy freemen do all tilling and herding and all deeds of craftsmanship: and above these are men whom they call masters and lords who do nought, nay not so much as smithy their own edge-weapons, but linger out their days in their dwellings and out of their dwellings, lying about in the sun or the hall-cinders, like cur-dogs who have ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... Ebers's early life was worth the telling, and he has told it himself, as no one else could tell it, with all the consummate skill of his perfected craftsmanship, with all the reverent love of an admiring son, and with all the happy exuberance of a careless youth remembered in all its brightness in the years of his maturity. Finally, the book teaches a beautiful lesson of fortitude ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... gallantly to the banged door: "Well, there is my wurrk. I will forget my petty pairsonal troubles in my wurrk, just as men do!" And she typed away, squeezing out such drops of pride of craftsmanship as can be found in that mechanical exercise, making no mistakes, and ending the lines so that they built up a well-proportioned page, so intently that she had almost finished before she noticed that it was funny ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... disengaged himself, not because he did not believe in his principles, but because he saw that the difficulties were insuperable. He came back to the old life; he flung himself with renewed ardour into art and craftsmanship. He began to write the beautiful and romantic prose tales, with their enchanting titles, which are, perhaps, his most characteristic work. He learnt by slow degrees that a clean sweep of an evil system cannot be made in a period or a lifetime by an individual, however serious ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... not then; her hand became cooler, her breathing more easy; she smiled to us. Once more I could work by snatches, and was glad, but what was the result to me compared to the joy of hearing that voice from the other room? There lay all the work I was ever proud of, the rest is but honest craftsmanship done to give her coal and food and softer pillows. My thousand letters that she so carefully preserved, always sleeping with the last beneath the sheet, where one was found when she died - they are the only writing of mine of which I shall ever boast. I would not there ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... admired by this new school are certainly the mirrors of that side of the nineteenth-century development most opposed to fine painting, or, say, fine craftsmanship. Hurry, rush, fashion, are the enemies of toil, patience, and seclusion, without which no great works are produced. Hence the admiration for an art fully answering to a demand. No doubt impressionism is an expression in painting of the deplorable ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... astronomical clock made by Passement and Danthiau for Louis XV. between 1749 and 1753. The form of the case has been much criticized, and even ridiculed, but the severest critics in that particular have been the readiest to laud the boldness and freedom of the motives, the jewel-like finish of the craftsmanship, the magnificent dexterity of the master-hand. The elder Caffieri was, indeed, the most consummate practitioner of the style rocaille, which he constantly redeemed from its mannered conventionalism by the ease and mastery with which he treated it. From the studio in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... in the finer shades of literary craftsmanship, there is great uncertainty in my mind whether it is good or bad "art" to anticipate your next chapter by foreshadowing its contents; but whether good or bad art, the remembrance of my miseries on the eventful occasion I wish to describe was so strong upon me as I wrote the last few lines ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... a broad low room, full of soft colours and the warm glow of highly polished wood. Walls, curtains, and carpet were all of powder-blue; an old rose fabric covered what seats there were; an apple-green coverlet filled up the symphony. That taper elegance which modern craftsmanship can give mahogany was most apparent, lending the usual suite unusual comeliness. A great pier-glass flashed in a corner, upon a little table beside a deep chair a bowl of roses sweetened the London air, above the well-found bed ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... joint with undercut vee'd ends which prevent the joint from lipping up or down or sideways. It is a useful joint, calling for careful setting out and accurate craftsmanship. Folding wedges are used in this case to draw ...
— Woodwork Joints - How they are Set Out, How Made and Where Used. • William Fairham
... of Dreiser, considered as craftsmanship pure and simple, is extremely uneven, and the distance separating his best from his worst is almost infinite. It is difficult to believe that the novelist who wrote certain extraordinarily vivid chapters in "Jennie Gerhardt," and "A Hoosier Holiday," and, above ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... work at this time of day would amount to bad form. There is a cliche in nearly every line of the Athenaeum's discriminating notice. "Mr. Conrad is not the kind of author whose work one is content to meet only in fugitive form," etc. "Those who appreciate fine craftsmanship in fiction," etc. But there is worse than cliches. For example: "It is too studiously chiselled and hammered-out for that." (God alone knows for what.) Imagine the effect of studiously chiselling a work and ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... have a certain interest as a quiet chronicle of an old social order which has gone never to return. The comparison of Mr. Marshall's work with that of Anthony Trollope is as inevitable as it is to the former's disadvantage. This volume shows honest, sincere craftsmanship, and never rises nor falls below an average level ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... with queer-looking Indian carvings, pictures upon silk, and other products of Eastern craftsmanship. The table and the several chairs were Oriental in character, but the articles upon the table were very European and businesslike in appearance. Furthermore, the Hindu gentleman, who wore correct evening dress, might have been the representative of an Eastern banking ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... as a matter of course, but there is no particular individuality in his handling of it. Style he has not, nor any background of romance, or beauty of that sort that illumines the grayness of the comedies of Ibsen, or of any other sort of beauty than that approach to beauty there is in skilled craftsmanship. ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... the quality of their appreciation. Even in those years they found in Cabell's early tales what we find who have since been directed to them by the curiosity engendered by his later work, namely, a superb craftsmanship in recreating a vanished age, an atmosphere in keeping with the themes, a fluid, graceful, personal style, a poetic ecstasy, a fine sense of drama, and a unity and symmetry which are the ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... sacred circle of art, as I am certain that they are without it. To me beauty is a holy and bewildering passion; a divine spirit, that sometimes heaps treasures upon me with both hands, and sometimes denies the least hint of her influence. But they, I feel, mistake craftsmanship and accomplishment and technique for the inner spirit of art; they have never felt the awful rapture, the overwhelming impulse. And thus, as I say, I return with a sense of weary gratitude to my lonely house with ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... emergence, from out the present chaos, of this social element equipped, organized, educated, conscious of itself and of distinctive aims, in the next hundred years? In the first place there is the spirit of trade unionism, the conservative contagion of the old craftsmanship. Trade Unions arose under the tradition of the old order, when in every business, employer and employed stood in marked antagonism, stood as a special instance of the universal relationship of gentle or intelligent, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... where technique in story-writing is paramount, it is natural that the American short story should seem to reveal grave deficiencies. I am by no means disposed to minimize the weakness of American craftsmanship, but I feel that at the present stage of our literary development, discouragement will prove a very easy and fatal thing. The typical point of view of the European critic, when justified, is adequately reflected in an article ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and present an untouched photograph of them just as I rubbed them off the stones (Fig. 17). The whole of the originals are to be found in the neighbouring churchyards of Shorne and Chalk, two rural parishes on the Rochester Road, and exhibit with all the fidelity possible the craftsmanship of the village sculptors. They will doubtless also excite some speculation as to their meaning. My belief, as already expressed, is that the uppermost four are the embodiment of the rustic yearning for the ideal; in other words, attempts to represent ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... murdered, Raemaekers can make the dreadful spectacle bearable by the piercing dignity with which he portrays the dead. In none of these cartoons is his saeva indignatio rendered with more sheer beauty of design, or with a craftsmanship more exquisite, than in this monument to the sea-mined prey. The symbolism is perfect, and of the essence of the design. The dead sink slowly to their resting-place, but the merciful twilight of the sea veils from us the glazed ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... can leave in doubt the great distinction of her craftsmanship. Very certainly she must have made her reputation by this book, if it had not been ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... excellence of craftsmanship in Rossetti's sonnets was early recognised; but the fertility of thought, and range of emotion compassed by this part of his work constitute an excellence far higher than any that belongs to perfection of form, rhythm, or metre. Mr. Palgrave has well said that a poet's story differs from a narrative ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... was the key of the door of the vault. Removing his overall, Kerry laid it with his cane upon the scrap-heap, then he climbed down the ladder and found himself in the mouth of that low timbered tunnel, like a trenchwork, which owed its existence to the cunning craftsmanship of Sin Sin Wa. Stooping uncomfortably, he made his way along the passage until the massive door confronted him. He was in no doubt as to which key to employ; his mental condition was such that he was indifferent to the dangers which probably ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer |
