Craft Craftsman Quotes

He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.

If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it.

Cooking is a craft, I like to think, and a good cook is a craftsman — not an artist. There's nothing wrong with that: the great cathedrals of Europe were built by craftsmen — though not designed by them. Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable and satisfying.

No. Not yet. A craftsman only. But I dream to be an artist. I pray that someday, if I work with enough care, if I am very very lucky, I will make a weapon that is a work of art. Call me an artist then, and I will answer.

Art with a big A makes professionals uneasy. All art is one, and there is no difference in the mystery of the craft, only in the hand and eye of the craftsman.

[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.

Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to.... How different everything is for the craftsman who ... can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object--whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug--and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see.

[Soetsu Yanagi's] main criticism of individual craftsmen and modern artists is that they are overproud of their individualism. I think I am right in saying Yanagi's belief was that the good artist of craftsman has no personal pride because in his soul he knows that any prowess he shows is evidence of that Other Power. Therefore what Yanagi says is 'Take heed of the humble; be what you are by birthright; there is no room for arrogance'.

Can you trust that if you put in the effort, the rest will take care of itself? Because it will. Love the craft, be a craftsman.

It is a grotesque misapprehension which sees in art no more than a craft comprehensible perfectly only to the craftsman: art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand.

In the workshop, wishing won't make it so. The craftsman is forced to come to terms with the physical properties of materials, the mechanical properties of tools, and the real capacity and limits of his own dexterity, discipline and imagination. In this way, craft's materiality imposes cooperation on the sometimes discordant factions of the mind. By necessity, it reconciles the desire to interpret the world in ways that are emotionally gratifying with the countervailing need for accurate information to facilitate effective decisions. Thus the holistic quality of craft lies not only in engaging the whole person but also in harmonising his understanding of himself in the world.

Whatever humble art you practice: Are you sure you’re making time for it? Are you loving what you do enough to make the time? Can you trust that if you put in the effort, the rest will take care of itself? Because it will. Love the craft, be a craftsman.

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?

Crime was my career. I considered myself a craftsman | a true professional. Everybody has a craft they practice. Clean or dirty, safe or dangerous, we all have a viable skill and a part to play in the enigma that comprises our world. A professional is a person who earns moneys for practicing their craft. Having labored many years and becoming experienced in a particular skill, you learn the gradations and eventually reach the title of master.

Smell the aroma of beautiful food, then go to the latrine and sniff. "What happened to you?" Your dung will answer, "My beauty was a lure, a trick to get inside you." Every matter particle does the same enchantment. Try to see the beginning and end at once. Would you willingly wear manacles just because they're made of gold? Admire the genius of an artist, but also watch what happens to him or her in old age, how the expert craftsman's craft diminishes.

Every once in a bestseller list, you come across a truly exceptional craftsman, a wordsmith so adept at cutting, shaping, and honing strings of words that you find yourself holding your breath while those words pass from page to eye to brain. You know the feeling: you inhale, hold it, then slowly let it out, like one about to take down a bull moose with a Winchester .30-06. You force your mind to the task, scope out the area, take penetrating aim, and . . . read. But instead of dropping the quarry, you find you’ve become the hunted, the target. The projectile has somehow boomeranged and with its heat-sensing abilities (you have raised a sweat) darts straight towards you. Duck! And turn the page lest it drill between your eyes.

There is a musical instrument, one that is in fact little more than a toy, that we in Viron used to call Molpe’s dulcimer. Strings are arranged in a certain way and drawn tight above a chamber of thin wood that swells the sound when they are strummed by the wind. Horn made several for his young siblings before we went into the tunnels; when I made them, I dreamed of making a better one someday, one constructed with all the knowledge and care that a great craftsman would bring to the task, a fitting tribute to Molpe. I have never built it, as you will have guessed already. I have the craft now, perhaps; but I have never had the musical knowledge the task would require, and I never will. If I had built it, it might have sounded something like that, because I would have made it sound as much like a human voice as I could; and if I were the great craftsman I once dreamed of becoming, I would have come very near—and yet not near enough. That is how it was with the Mother’s voice. It was lovely and uncanny, like Molpe’s dulcimer; and although it was not in truth very remote as well as I could judge, there was that in it that sounded very far away indeed. I have since thought that the distance was perhaps of time, that we heard a song on that warm, calm evening that was not merely hundreds but thousands of years old, sung as it had been sung when the Short Sun of Blue was yet young, and floating to us across that lonely sea with a pain of loss and longing that my poor words cannot express. No, not even if I could whisper them aloud to you of the future, and certainly not as I am constrained to speak to you now with Oreb’s laboring black wingfeather. Nor with a quill from any other bird that ever flew. *

I’ve said before that every craftsman searches for what’s not there to practice his craft. A builder looks for the rotten hole where the roof caved in. A water carrier picks the empty pot. A carpenter stops at the house with no door. Workers rush toward some hint of emptiness, which they then start to fill. Their hope, though, is for emptiness, so don’t think you must avoid it. It contains what you need!        Dear soul, if you were not friends with the vast nothing inside, why would you always be casting your net into it, and waiting so patiently? This invisible ocean has given you such abundance, but still you call it “death,” that which provides you sustenance and work. God has allowed some magical reversal to occur, so that you see the scorpion pit as an object of desire, and all the beautiful expanse around it as dangerous and swarming with snakes. This is how strange your fear of death and emptiness is, and how perverse the attachment to what you want.

It has been noted in various quarters that the half-illiterate Italian violin maker Antonio Stradivari never recorded the exact plans or dimensions for how to make one of his famous instruments. This might have been a commercial decision (during the earliest years of the 1700s, Stradivari’s violins were in high demand and open to being copied by other luthiers). But it might also have been because, well, Stradivari didn’t know exactly how to record its dimensions, its weight, and its balance. I mean, he knew how to create a violin with his hands and his fingers but maybe not in figures he kept in his head. Today, those violins, named after the Latinized form of his name, Stradivarius, are considered priceless. It is believed there are only around five hundred of them still in existence, some of which have been submitted to the most intense scientific examination in an attempt to reproduce their extraordinary sound quality. But no one has been able to replicate Stradivari’s craftsmanship. They’ve worked out that he used spruce for the top, willow for the internal blocks and linings, and maple for the back, ribs, and neck. They’ve figured out that he also treated the wood with several types of minerals, including potassium borate, sodium and potassium silicate, as well as a handmade varnish that appears to have been composed of gum arabic, honey, and egg white. But they still can’t replicate a Stradivarius. The genius craftsman never once recorded his technique for posterity. Instead, he passed on his knowledge to a number of his apprentices through what the philosopher Michael Polyani called “elbow learning.” This is the process where a protégé is trained in a new art or skill by sitting at the elbow of a master and by learning the craft through doing it, copying it, not simply by reading about it. The apprentices of the great Stradivari didn’t learn their craft from books or manuals but by sitting at his elbow and feeling the wood as he felt it to assess its length, its balance, and its timbre right there in their fingertips. All the learning happened at his elbow, and all the knowledge was contained in his fingers. In his book Personal Knowledge, Polyani wrote, “Practical wisdom is more truly embodied in action than expressed in rules of action.”1 By that he meant that we learn as Stradivari’s protégés did, by feeling the weight of a piece of wood, not by reading the prescribed measurements in a manual. Polyani continues, To learn by example is to submit to authority. You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things even when you cannot analyze and account in detail for its effectiveness. By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself. These hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another.

Here is the riddle: a master craftsman produces an organism with a massive design flaw. Something is wrong with this picture. Unless, of course, it's not one organism. It's two organisms, one inside the other. Depression is not evolution's failure at crafting humans. It's evolution's success at crafting another organism which uses human suffering as nutrition. The master craftsman didn't fail. He succeeded twice.

Io credo che il lavoro manuale sia così essenziale, così naturale, che il bisogno irresistibile di farvi ricorso non cesserà mai di manifestarsi. Inoltre la caratteristica intrinseca dell'opera artigianale è quella di mantenere un contatto vivo e costante col cuore dell'uomo, e così il lavoro acquista una qualità umana. Tutto ciò che nasce dalla macchina è figlio del cervello e quindi manca di umanità.

Una cosa utile non può essere poco pratica o fragile in quanto esiste una stretta relazione fra funzione e bellezza. Un oggetto per essere utile deve essere affidabile, e non perdona nessuna indulgenza. Nel creare un oggetto destinato all'uso pratico, chi lo fa non pone se stesso in primo piano o nel caso specifico, in superficie. In questi oggetti l'errore, l'autoaffermazione sono ridotti al minimo. È questo forse un altro dei motivi per cui le cose d'utilità pratica sono belle. Secondo me, gli oggetti il cui creatore rimane anonimo hanno facile accesso alla bellezza: il fatto che i più begli esempi di arte funzionale esistenti al mondo siano quasi sempre quelli che non hanno avuto l'opportunità di recare la firma di chi li ha fatti, dovrebbe far riflettere molto seriamente.

Un'opera priva d'innata bellezza è un'opera morta: ecco qual'è dunque l'importanza dell'artista-artigiano al quale noi oggi chiediamo non solo di produrre delle buone opere, ma anche di lavorare a stretto contatto con l'artigianato tradizionale in modo da far rivivere la bellezza anche negli oggetti di uso comune.

Acclaim for the past works of Charles Martin “Beautiful writing . . . offers hope and redemption without too-neat resolution.” —Publishers Weekly regarding Maggie “. . . charming characters and twists that keep the pages turning.” —Southern Living, regarding When Crickets Cry Southern Living Book-of-the-Month selection, April 2006 “How is Charles Martin able to take mere words and breathe such vibrant life into them? Each character is drawn with an artist’s attention to detail, beauty and purpose. Readers won’t want the story to end because that means leaving these lovable people who have become so much more than just a name in a book.” —inthelibraryreviews.net regarding When Crickets Cry “[The Dead Don’t Dance is] an absorbing read for fans of faith-based fiction . . . [with] delightfully quirky characters . . . [who] are ingeniously imaginative creations.” —Publishers Weekly “[In When Crickets Cry,] Martin has created highly developed characters, lifelike dialogue, and a well-crafted story.” —Christian Book Previews.com “Martin spins an engaging story about healing and the triumph of love . . . Filled with delightful local color.” —Publishers Weekly regarding Wrapped in Rain “[O]ne of the best books I’ve been asked to review, and certainly the best one this year!” — bestfiction.tripod.com regarding When Crickets Cry “Charles Martin has proven himself a master craftsman. Double the story-telling ability of Nicholas Sparks, throw in hints of Michael Crichton and Don J. Snyder, and you have Charles Martin.

Of the greatest of the gods, the victor of the battle on the Plain of Towers, Lugh Lámhfada, god of all knowledge, patron of all arts and crafts, his name is still known today. But as memory of the mighty warrior, the invincible god, has faded, he is known only as Lugh-chromain, little stooping Lugh of the sídhe, relegated to the role of a fairy craftsman. And, as even the language in which he was venerated has disappeared, all that is left of the supreme god of the Children of Danu is the distorted form of that name Lugh-chromain . . . leprechaun.

A good craftsman is one who gives right to his work. When he starts his work, he must focus on it. If he wants to own his craft, he must give it its right of time and effort to gain skills, and with time he works and learns. He is not called a teacher, because he always learns throughout his life

Steve Jobs cared even about the inside of his products, making sure they were beautifully designed even though the users would never see them. Taught by his father—who finished even the back of his cabinets though they would be hidden against the wall—to think like a craftsman. In every design predicament, Jobs knew his marching orders: Respect the craft and make something beautiful.

I propose that if you’re a knowledge worker—especially one interested in cultivating a deep work habit—you should treat your tool selection with the same level of care as other skilled workers, such as farmers. Following is my attempt to generalize this assessment strategy. I call it the craftsman approach to tool selection, a name that emphasizes that tools are ultimately aids to the larger goals of one’s craft. The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.

The engineering context of precision where precision is not necessary indicates the existence of sophisticated tools. These have not been found in the archaeological record, but the existence of them must be taken into account when we consider the mountain of circumstantial evidence to support their use. In the case of the Serapeum, the list of tools and instruments that are necessary to create the granite boxes has grown. We can say with certainty that exact measuring instruments existed, for this work and the work at Luxor and Karnak could not have been accomplished without them. They are the most important and necessary tools for such work. The wooden squares, plumb bobs, and alignment instruments on display in the Luxor and Cairo Museums are incapable of giving even the most talented craftsman the information he needs to know that his work has achieved this kind of accuracy. Even if these boxes and monuments were crafted today with modern tools, such instruments are limited in what they can measure--and they most certainly cannot explain the precision and geometry [on display].

Osip Mandelstam in the context of early twentieth-century Russia, his wife Nadezhda writes, “The poet’s mode of thought is the product of all sides of his personality: the intellectual, physiological, spiritual, and emotional, a synthesis of what he perceives through his senses, his instincts and desires, and the higher aspirations of his spirit. All these can be bound together only by some dominant idea which shapes the personality. If there is no such idea, one will have, at best, a clever craftsman, a ‘translator of ready-made ideas,’ a mechanical nightingale. The unifying idea can be located at any level of the personality—in its deep reaches or on the surface.

MYTH-1: Handmade items are costly! The items are modest yet the commitment of the craftsmen behind the items we offer is costly The vast majority of the cycles engaged with making the item are finished by the creator – the plan, however, the choice of the materials, the working out of how to cause the materials to go together, gathering the item, capturing the item, advertising the item, planning the bundling, and posting, conveying, or action selling. In spite of this, the items that the fasten organization offers you are truly sensible. Haven't viewed our list? here you go! (click here) Have you ever discovered such wonderful hand-made items at such modest rates?? I GUESS NOT! MYTH-2: HAND-MADE PRODUCTS ARE NOT STYLISH On the off chance that you believe that way, I have an inquiry for you – did your grandmother convey such a shopping pack when went out to get for food supplies or did she have such telephone and individual embellishment sacks? Certainly not. The crafted works are not, at this point unfashionable or old-fashioned. Actually, they are intended for pioneers. Simply being an aspect of the pattern and following it has neither rhyme nor reason. Be the person who sets it MYTH-3: HANDMADE GOODS ARE OF POOR QUALITY I can't envision how individuals have such misguided judgment. The machine-made merchandise is to some degree bargained with quality. In any case, with regards to hand made items, they are taken well consideration of by the craftsmen as referenced above, there is no trade-off with the quality. They are made of cotton and jute which are solid and strong. They are lightweight and simple to deal with. MYTH-4: THEY ARE SAME OLD PATTERNS You can't quit lecturing about the handcrafted items which are extremely extraordinary as it will never be equivalent to some other the explanation being that they are delivered by the hands of a craftsman and not a machine. The sack so made is a result of devotion, love, energy, and the enthusiasm to serve the client. Individuals love block prints due to the strong and straightforward plans that can be made, yet that effortlessness finds a way to accomplish. The strategy is brilliant for pictures with only a couple of tones and fewer subtleties however can be hard to use for pictures with bunches of little content, or extremely fine subtleties that will, in general, sever the square with such a large number of employments. One of the benefits of square printing is that it very well may be done on a surface of practically any size and surface. I print on texture, paper, canvas, wood, and different materials, and you don't need to stress over fitting it through a printer or a press. MYTH-5: HANDMADE PRODUCTS ARE NOT LONG LASTING Recollect the last cowhide sack you had? Which lost its covering not long after getting wet in a downpour or subsequent to utilizing it for 3-4 times. That is not the situation with hand-made cotton packs. They are launderable which makes it look clean with each utilization. No problem with the upkeep.

But he’s the best leatherworker in Serin,” Cayla insisted, “and he’s so honored to be crafting your holsters. I told him you greatly appreciated his efforts, and he was so flustered, he spilled half a shelf of sheaths on the ground. I helped him clean it all up, though, and then he posted a beautiful, hand-soldered sign in his front window that says ‘Personal Craftsman to the Honorable Baron Flynt.’” Now, I turned around. “He’s not my personal craftsman,” I clarified, “he’s yours, and I don’t know that I like--” “Mason, he’s eighty-three years old and has seventeen great grandchildren running around his shop,” Cayla informed me, and any irritation I had just poofed into dust. “Oh,” I replied as my women giggled. “Well, then Hugo’s my personal craftsman. But I don’t really think I need a whip.

But then, I think of the idols in my own life, the things I turn to before I turn to God. Sometimes, I am my own craftsman, crafting my way without seeking God’s way. My idols too can be “like scarecrows in a cucumber field” (10:5).

Giants in Jeans Sonnet 15 I am the craftsman, I am the craft. I am the artist, I am the art. I am the infinity, I am absolution. I am impossibility, I am the solution. I am the just, As well as justice. I am equality, As well as its means. There's always a way, so long as I exist, And I exist wherever there's a Universalist.

Art is its own thing, and so is craft — and creativity is common to both, in the same way as its absence. Without it, the craftsman is nothing, but just that: a craftsman; and not creative; and an artist without that creative spark is no poet: he is just someone who writes things.

Neither in Greek nor in Latin was there a word with which to express the general notion of 'labour' or the concept of labour 'as a general social function.' The nature and conditions of labour in antiquity precluded the emergence of such general ideas, as of the idea of a working class. 'Men never rest from toil and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night,' said Hesiod (Works and Days 176-8). That is a descriptive statement, a statement of fact, not of ideology; so is the conclusion, that it is therefore better to toil than to perish, and better still to turn to the labour of slaves if one can. But the world was not one of toil and sorrow for everybody, and there lay a difficulty. The expulsion from Eden had the saving feature that it embraced all mankind, and hence, though it linked work with sin and punishment, it did not degrade labour as such. A fate which is everyone's may be tragic, it cannot be shameful. Sin can be washed away, not natural moral inferiority. Aristotle's theory of natural slavery in the first book of the Politics was an extreme position, but those who did not accept it merely turned the doctrine round: men who engaged in the mean employments or in the slavish conditions of employment were made inferior by their work. Either way there was no consolation. All this, it will be objected, is based on the views of the upper classes and their spokesmen among the intellectuals, not on the views of those who worked but were voiceless. But they were not wholly so. They expressed themselves in their cults, for example, and it is to be noted that though Hephaestus (the Roman Vulcan), the craftsman among the gods, was in a sense a patron of the crafts, and especially of the metallurgists, he was an inferior deity in heaven and he received little formal worship and few temples on earth. The most 'popular' classical cults were the ecstatic ones, particularly that of Dionysus/Bacchus, the god of intoxication (in more senses than one). Through Dionysus one did not celebrate toil, one obtained release from it. Those who worked also expressed their views in their demands for land, already noticed, and in their failure to ally themselves with the slaves on those relatively rare occasions when the latter revolted.