"Craftsmanship" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 of age and continual usage. If you notice, the floor of the recess was ...
— General Max Shorter • Kris Ottman Neville
... 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 of Amelia? that although we do ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... not apparatus for many pupils to work, so the class had been limited to seniors, among whom Doris Deane, Ruth White, and Stephanie Radford had begun to distinguish themselves. Each had made a small pendant, and while the craftsmanship might be amateurish, the general effect was artistic. Miss Teddington was delighted, and wishing to air her latest hobby, she decided to send the three pendants, together with some other specimens of school handiwork, to a small Art exhibition which was ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... probity and wisdom. He brought it, therefore, to Elias, who believed it to be gold, but, loth to trust his judgment, advised Mansur to show it to a certain jeweller of high repute, as well for virtue as for craftsmanship; and Mansur did so. The jeweller asked Mansur to leave it with him for a day or two, that he might apply certain tests, and when asked for a receipt, appeared so hurt, called so loudly upon Allah and the neighbourhood to attest his honesty, and in all respects ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... barrenness of what was best in that of man: nor is it to be wondered at, that, seeing her perfect and exquisite creations poured forth in a profusion which conception could not grasp nor calculation sum, he should think that it ill became him to be niggardly of his own rude craftsmanship; and where he saw throughout the universe a faultless beauty lavished on measureless spaces of broidered field and blooming mountain, to grudge his poor and imperfect labour to the few stones that he had raised one upon ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... screen looks too low for its position, whether it be viewed from the west end or from the triforium of the choir at the east end. The workmanship will not bear any minute comparison with the loving hand-craftsmanship of mediaeval times; much of it is more skilful as church furniture of a very mechanical kind than beautiful as real ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... lose himself in contemplating those airy abstractions and lofty visions of which alone he greatly cared to sing, to the neglect and detriment of the merely external and formal element of his song. Shelley recked little of the jots and tittles of literary craftsmanship; he committed many a small sin against the rules of grammar, and certainly paid but a halting attention to the nice distinctions of punctuation. Thus in the early editions a comma occasionally plays the part of a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... gratefully and half mournfully he 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 ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... dramatist, who introduced the rain-storm scene at the close of the second act which made one of the biggest hits of the performance. Throughout the play there were many evidences of Frohman's skill and craftsmanship. ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... Saragossa by the present of the tunic of St. Vincent, he induced the king to found the abbey and church of St. Vincent (St. Germain des Pres), to receive the relic and a great part of the spoil of Toledo, consisting of jewels, golden chalices, books and crucifixes of marvellous craftsmanship. In the same reign was begun on the site of the present sacristy of Notre Dame a great basilica, dedicated to St. Stephen, so magnificently decorated that it was compared to Solomon's Temple for the beauty ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... and cracked his neighbours' heads with the precision and fineness of touch which only manual craftsmanship can give. The housewives who flatly refused to cook the hot dinner knew how much or how little, cold meat there was in the house. The sailor who defied discipline by mutinying at the Nore did not defy discipline in the sense of falling off the rigging or letting ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... point in Warner's career, for the busts he produced were of a craftsmanship so delicate and beautiful that they at once established his position among his fellow-sculptors, though years elapsed before he received any wide public recognition. The truth is that he was too great and sincere an artist to cater to a public taste ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... 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 to the extent that, such design incorporates ...
— 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.
... his admirable collection of drawings of old furniture, Mr. Chancellor secures the gratitude of all admirers of the consummate craftsmanship of the past. His examples are selected from a variety of sources with fine discrimination, all having an expression and individuality of their own—qualities that are so conspicuously lacking in the furniture of our own day. It ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... development the principles of the Bret Harte School of short story writers. His style possesses those qualities necessary for telling a short tale,—directness, force, suggestiveness. Rarely has any writer so mastered the technique, the craftsmanship of this particular literary form. He has the gift of force and dramatic power, rather than ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... showed merely the high-boned, sphinx-like brown of their faces free from war-paint. The costumes of many were extremely beautiful, the wonderful beadwork on tunic and moccasins being a thing of amazing craftsmanship, though the elk-tooth decorations, though of great ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... day's work fixed it. The lid would stand open of itself until tipped at a considerable angle, when it would fall and lock. Only on the outer shell was there a lock: that one was a good bit of craftsmanship. ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... 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 in adversity, of suffering ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... on the platform, as in private conversation, there is an absolute simplicity about the man and his words; a simplicity, an earnestness, a complete honesty. And when he sets down, in his book on oratory, "A man has no right to use words carelessly," he stands for that respect for word-craftsmanship that every successful speaker or writer ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... musical training as Tchaikowsky and Rimsky-Korsakoff. He preserved his originality intact, but at a heavy cost. The weakness of his technique has been exaggerated by those who put down all his peculiarities to ignorance; but in some respects—particularly as regards orchestration—his craftsmanship was certainly unequal to the demands of his inspiration, for his aims were very lofty. Had this been otherwise, Moussorgsky's name would have been more closely linked with those of ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... was loud in my praise of the fine qualities of her great romance, The Divine Fire, confess to a sense of almost personal sorrow that such high gifts as hers, which still show no trace of decline in craftsmanship, should have suffered so much taint. I sincerely hope that the noble work she is now doing with the Red Cross at the front—where the best wishes of her many friends follow her—may make more clear the claim that is laid upon her to devote her exceptional powers as a writer to the higher ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... 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 ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... 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 black mark ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... additus naturae part of Boswell's work: the setting his subject in the light of his own imaginative and emotional insight. But there was more than that. Boswell had not only the temperament of the artist: he had an artist's craftsmanship. The Life makes four large octavo volumes, each of some 500 pages, in the great Oxford Edition by Birkbeck Hill: and the Tour to the Hebrides makes a fifth. That is a big book: yet so perfect an artist is Boswell, that scarcely once for a single page in all the five volumes ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... midst. To the European mind, trained in a tradition 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 by Mary M. Colum, which was published ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... a large temple on the outskirts of the city. It was certainly very big, also very dirty and ill-kept. Compared with the splendid temples of Nikko in Japan, glowing with scarlet and black lacquer, and gleaming with gold, temples on which cunning craftsmanship of wood-carving, enamels and bronze-work has been lavished in almost superfluous profusion, or even with the severer but dignified temples of unpainted cryptomeria wood at Kyoto, this Chinese pagoda was scarcely worth looking at. It had the usual three courts, an outer, middle, and inner ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... Florence, particularly by all the presses in the Sacristy of S. Maria del Fiore, the greater part of which he finished after the death of his uncle Giuliano; these are full of figures executed in inlaid work, foliage, and other devices, all wrought with great expense and craftsmanship. Having gained a very great name through the novelty of this art, he made many works, which were sent to diverse places and to various Princes; and among others King Alfonso of Naples had the furniture for a study, made under the direction of Giuliano, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... Leapt he from careless sleep: right well he knew The Immortal One celestial. Now his heart Could hold no thought beside; his mind was fixed Upon the wondrous work, and through his soul Marched marshalled each device of craftsmanship. ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... craftsmanship, the skill, the ease and beauty of Keene's line, to his knowledge of effect, to the very great artist is unmeasured. In fulfilment of his contract du Maurier speaks of himself and his "little bit of paper, a steel pen, and a bottle of ink—and, ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... economic considerations to credit the period of craftsmanship as a time in the evolution of wealth production that was rich in creative effort and opportunity for the individual worker. The craftsmanship period is valued in retrospect for its educative influence. There was opportunity then as there is not now for the worker to gain the ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... would have this series put artistic craftsmanship before people as furnishing reasonable occupations for those who would gain a livelihood. Although within the bounds of academic art, the competition, of its kind, is so acute that only a very few per cent. can fairly hope to succeed as painters and sculptors; yet, ...
— Wood-Block Printing - A Description of the Craft of Woodcutting and Colour Printing Based on the Japanese Practice • F. Morley Fletcher
... by the French rendering, but the secret is really no secret at all. Huxley produced his effects by the ordering of his ideas and not by the ordering of his words. From the technical point of view of literary craftsmanship, he cannot be assigned a high place; he is one of our great English writers, but he is not a great ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... of a cross, by which the Milanese of to-day express their triumph in liberation from Teutonic rule, that the "Baldacchino" of all mediaeval religious ceremony owed its origin to the taste of the milliners of Milan, as the safety of the best knights in European battle rested on the faithful craftsmanship of her armorers. ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... dizzy with sudden pain, Trying to span that gulf of years, Fronting again those long laid fears. Confess? Why, yes, if I must, I must. Now good Sant' Andrea be my trust! But fill me first, from that crystal flask, Strong wine to strengthen me for my task. (That thing is a gem of craftsmanship: Just mark how its curvings fit ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... fourth decade by fashioning his garments skillfully. His coat fitted like a skin across his shoulders but hung loosely in front. The braid of a colored waistcoat was a marvel of suggestion in indicating a waist, and the same adept craftsmanship carried the eye in faultless lines to his verni boots. Judged by his profile, he was not ill looking. His features were regular, the mouth and chin strong, the forehead slightly rounded, and the nose gave the merest hint of Semitic origin. Taken altogether, he had the style of ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... in wonder-land, and among supernatural or magical conditions. But the forging of the shield and the wonderful house of Alcinous are no merely incongruous episodes in Homer, but the consummation of what is always characteristic of him, a constant preoccupation, namely, with every form of lovely craftsmanship, resting on all things, as he says, like the shining of the sun. We seem to pass, in reading him, through the treasures of some royal collection; in him the presentation of almost every aspect of life is [197] beautified by the work of cunning ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... certain new force about the story, a kind of master-craftsmanship and mental dominance ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... existed or that the picture is altogether overdrawn. 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 contribution ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... should remain ignorant of everything else. It is important that he should think as a painter as well as work as a painter. If he has no thought of what all this practical is for, he will get a false idea of his craft. He will see, and think of, and believe in, nothing but the craftsmanship: that which every good workman respects as good and necessary, but which the wise workman knows is but the perfect means for the expression ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... is a scarfed 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 up ...
— Woodwork Joints - How they are Set Out, How Made and Where Used. • William Fairham
... Italian painting, in Homer or Theocritus at the two extremes of Greek poetry—he will recognize the work as ranking with those things from which the soul draws nourishment. At the same time, he may not neglect the claims of craftsmanship. Each art has its own vehicle of expression, and exacts some innate capacity for the use of that vehicle from the artist. Therefore the critic must be also sufficiently versed in technicalities to give them their due value. It can, however, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... of absorbing interest turning on a complicated plot worked out with dexterous craftsmanship. A capital yarn of European secret ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... introduces dainty aerial creatures, gnomes, sprites, sylphs, to combat for the belles and fops in their trivial concerns; and herein we see a clever burlesque of the old epic poems, in which gods or goddesses entered into the serious affairs of mortals. The craftsmanship of the poem is above praise; it is not only a neatly pointed satire on eighteenth-century fashions but is one of the most graceful works in ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long |
