Famous Craftsman Quotes

Daphne du Maurier was the fifth-generation descendant of a French master craftsman who settled in England during the Revolution. The Glass-Blowers, the fictionalized story of his family, was originally published in 1963, but du Maurier first conceived of writing about her French forebears in the mid-1950s. She had recently completed her novel about Mary Anne Clarke, her famous great-great-grandmother, and a complementary work about the French side of her family seemed logical.

In cultural production, Levi-Strauss famously declares, food is both good to eat (bonne a manger) and good to think with (bonne a penser). He means this literally: cooking food begets the idea of heating for other purposes; people who share parts of a cooked deer begin to think they can share parts of a heated house; the abstraction "he is a warm person" (in the sense of "sociable") then becomes possible to think.14 These are domain shifts.

In China our professional artists or craftsman used to carve large pieces of white ivory into models of famous buildings, such as the Peking Palace or the Temple of Heaven, with streets and people to the minutest detail. I have been fortunate enough to see a few of theses, and the snow-covered Oxford High, with its yellow stone, resembled one of these exquisite ivory carvings, yellowed with age. I was happy to have discovered such affinity between Oxford and Ancient China.

All right. Your name before mine. You are the greatest sword maker, you deserve to come first." "Have a good trip back." "WHY WON'T YOU?" "Because, my friend Yeste, you are very famous and very rich, and so you should be, because you make wonderful weapons. But you must also make them for any fool who happens along. I am poor, and no one knows me in all the world except you and Inigo, but I do not have to suffer fools." "You are an artist," Yeste said. "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.

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.

OCP: The Open-Closed Principle Bertrand Meyer made this principle famous in the 1980s. The gist is that for software systems to be easy to change, they must be designed to allow the behavior of those systems to be changed by adding new code, rather than changing existing code.

LSP: The Liskov Substitution Principle Barbara Liskov’s famous definition of subtypes, from 1988. In short, this principle says that to build software systems from interchangeable parts, those parts must adhere to a contract that allows those parts to be substituted one for another.

• OCP: The Open-Closed Principle Bertrand Meyer made this principle famous in the 1980s. The gist is that for software systems to be easy to change, they must be designed to allow the behavior of those systems to be changed by adding new code, rather than changing existing code.

But even during an event as exceptional as the world famous troubadour's just concluded performance, the travelers kept to themselves remaining in clearly delineated groups. Elves stayed with elves. Dwarvish craftsman gathered with their kin who would often hide to protect their merchant caravans and were armed to the teeth. The groups tolerated at best the gnome miners and halfling farmers who camped beside them. All non-humans were uniformly distant towards humans. The humans re-payed in kind but were not seem to mix amongst themselves either. Nobility looked down on the merchants and traveling salesman with open scorn. While soldiers and mercenaries, distanced themselves from shepherds and their reeking sheepskins. The few wizards and their disciples, kept themselves entirely apart from the others and bestowed their arrogance on everyone in equal parts. A tied knit, dark and silent group of peasants lurked in the background resembling a forest with their rakes, pitchforks and flails, poking above their heads. They were ignored by all. The exception, as ever was the children. Freed from the constraints of silence which have been enforced during the bards performance, the children dashed into the woods with wild cries and enthusiastically immersed themselves in a game whose rules were incomprehensible to all those who have bidden farewell to the happy years of childhood. Children of elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes, half elves, quarter elves and toddlers of mysterious provenance, neither knew or recognized racial or social divisions. At least, not yet.