"Watchmaker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... should always be enough for himself. He should have enough of principle and enough of conscience to restrain him from doing what he knows to be wrong. But can a ship-builder build his ship single-handed, or the watchmaker make his watch without assistance? On former occasions such as this, I could say, with little or no help from without, whether I would or would not undertake the work that was proposed to me, because I had only a bit of the ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... things rarely happen as you anticipate them, and thus that your anticipation of the thing might possibly keep it away? Of course you have; for you are a human being. And in all common cases, a watch might as well think to keep a skilful watchmaker in ignorance of the way in which its movements are produced, as a human being think to prevent another human being from knowing exactly how he will think and feel in given circumstances. We have watched the working of our own watches far too closely and long, my friends, to have the least ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... one of them, an elderly watchmaker, got up and made a dry and cynical little speech, nothing moving but the thin lips in the shrivelled mahogany face. Robert knew the man well. He was a Genevese by birth, Calvinist by blood, revolutionist by development. He complained that Mr. Elsmere had ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... lamp and taking my hand she led me up a stone staircase to the Dormitory, which was a similar room, but not so silent, because it was full of beds, and the breathing of the girls, who were all asleep, made it sound like the watchmaker's shop in our village, only more ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... honest living. The woman good-naturedly took her off, and signed to the miscreant to make himself and his remains scarce. This he did with a scowl; and was found in the evening in the village, telling a series of lies to the watchmaker, and bribing him with a shilling to mend his pipes—"his ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... and belonged to an officer. This theft was committed at the hospital, where Sparrow was at the time a patient, although able to work occasionally at his business; and being a young man of abilities as a watchmaker, and of good character, was employed by most of the gentlemen of the settlement. Suspicion fell upon a notorious thief who was in the same ward, and who had some time before proposed to another man to take the box. On his examination he accused two others ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... the name of Duck Downie was a ferocious- looking little fellow who had, before he decided to devote his energies to the extermination of her Majesty's foes, been a watchmaker's apprentice. He came, forward at the invitation, and cast his eye in the direction indicated. It was evidently the first time he had known that Paddy so much as owned a watch; for he stared hard at me, and then said ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it will do more than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies. Our body is like a perfect watch that should go for a certain time; the watchmaker cannot open it, he can only adjust it by fumbling, and that blindfold.... Yes, our body is just a machine ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... unconsciously, by the spirit of the time. He proved (in his Natural Theology) the existence of God by the argument from design —without taking any account of the criticisms of Hume on that argument. Just as a watchmaker is inferred from a watch, so a divine workman is inferred from contrivances in nature. Paley takes his instances of such contrivance largely from the organs and constitution of the human body. His idea of God is that of an ingenious contriver dealing with rather ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... their father, and that the ground-rent would bring them in two thousand pounds per annum. With such an independent income, I doubt whether any American would consent to be anything but a gentleman,—certainly not an operative watchmaker. How sensible these Englishmen are in ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... As Monsieur Morissot, watchmaker by profession and idler for the nonce, was strolling along the boulevard one bright January morning, his hands in his trousers pockets and stomach empty, he suddenly came face to face with an ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... far more costly in a land into which the legal practitioners must be imported from an immense distance. All English labour in India, from the labour of the Governor-General and the Commander-in-Chief, down to that of a groom or a watchmaker, must be paid for at a higher rate than at home. No man will be banished, and banished to the torrid zone, for nothing. The rule holds good with respect to the legal profession. No English barrister will work, fifteen thousand ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... time and another that will not go at all, there is therefore a great structural hiatus between the two watches. A hair in the balance-wheel, a little rust on a pinion, a bend in a tooth of the escapement, a something so slight that only the practised eye of the watchmaker can discover it, may be the source ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... step from 'ere, but I knows every inch of t' way." At all events (as of course I could not allow this) he would now act as my guide. And he did. "First to the right.... Now we're goin' by a big watchmaker's-and-jeweller's.... Now cross t' street.... Now on th' corner over there by t' Sinnemer is w'ere we git ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... been opened to all those who had the grande entree—that is to say, to the officers of his household, the marshals of France, several favored ladies; further, to his cafetier, his tailor, the bearer of his slippers, his barber, with two assistants, his watchmaker, ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... account of his deafness and dumbness; the one thing I saw was his mastership over a single subject. Gradually my incompleteness came to weigh on me like a nightmare. I imagined that if I had learned any craft which required skill, I should have been content. I was depressed when I looked at the watchmaker examining my watch. I should have walked the streets erect if there had been one thing which I could do better than anybody I met. There was nothing: I stood for nothing: no purpose was intended by God through me. I was also constitutionally ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... rings on them. Anne and Letty did not understand their value, but nevertheless even they could guess that they belonged to a superior description of jewellery from that which was displayed beneath the glass cases of Mr. Kurtz the watchmaker of Shadywalk. Then Clarissa's dress was of fine quality, and made beautifully, and her little gold watch with its chain "put a finish upon it," Anne said. A little hair necklace with a gold clasp was round her neck besides; and her comb was ...
— What She Could • Susan Warner
... figure, is seated in front of his watchmaker's establishment near the Place St. Sulpice. The awning sags, and the shop wears an air of sober discouragement. Whatever expression the years have left Perron's round face capable of is concentrated upon the changing scenes cinematographed ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... upon these men in England, whether for or against, were all personal. The Dost was the favourite—which was generous—as he had no solitary merit to plead except that he had lost the election; or, as the watchmaker's daughter so pointedly said on behalf of Nigel Lord Glenvarloch, "Madam, he is unfortunate." Searching, however, in all corners for the undiscovered virtues of the Dost, as Bruce for the coy fountains ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... sounded "whizz." Then a spring cracked. "Whir-r-r-r" went all the wheels, running round, and then the music stopped. The emperor immediately sprang out of bed, and called for his physician; but what could he do? Then they sent for a watchmaker; and, after a great deal of talking and examination, the bird was put into something like order; but he said that it must be used very carefully, as the barrels were worn, and it would be impossible to put in new ones without injuring the music. Now there was great sorrow, as the bird could ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... of the watch that had been long out of order, and the cause of its irregularity not to be discovered. At length, one watchmaker, more ingenious than the rest, suggested that a magnet might, by some chance, have touched the mainspring. This was ascertained by experiment to have been the case; the casual and temporary neighbourhood of a magnet had deranged the whole complicated machinery: ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... Jervis," my friend observed as his assistant retired. "Looks like a rural dean or a chancery judge, and was obviously intended by Nature to be a professor of physics. As an actual fact he was first a watchmaker, then a maker of optical instruments, and now he is mechanical factotum to a medical jurist. He is my right-hand, is Polton; takes an idea before you have time to utter it—but you will make ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... of the armature in both of these instruments takes a sensible time, but Alexander Bain, of Thurso, by trade a watchmaker, and by nature a genius, invented a chemical telegraph which was capable of a prodigious activity. The instrument of Bain resembled the Morse in marking the signals on a tape of moving paper, but this was done by electrolysis or electro-chemical decomposition. The paper ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... practical and businesslike, in fact the greatest of them always are," he defended. "There was Voltaire, the successful watchmaker at Ferney ... and there was Shakespeare, who, after his success in London, returned to Avon and practically bought up the whole town ... he even ran a butcher shop ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... enough to whittle a cider-tap so it would not leak. I never could make a pen that I could write with, or understand the principle of a steam-engine. If a man was to take such a boy as I was, and attempt to make a watchmaker of him, the boy might, after an apprenticeship of five or seven years be able to take apart and put together a watch; but all through life he would be working uphill and seizing every excuse for leaving his work and idling away his time. ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... WATCH for one, and CLOCK for the other, and distinct complex ideas to which those names belong, to HIM they are different species. It will be said perhaps, that the inward contrivance and constitution is different between these two, which the watchmaker has a clear idea of. And yet it is plain they are but one species to him, when he has but one name for them. For what is sufficient in the inward contrivance to make a new species? There are some watches that are made with four wheels, others with five; is this a specific ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... 1789 at Portland, in the State of Maine, was a watchmaker, whom the solar eclipse of 1806 attracted to study the wonders of the heavens. When, in 1815, the erection of an observatory in connection with Harvard College, Cambridge, was first contemplated, he undertook a mission to England ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... the most extraordinary characters in history. Caron de Beaumarchais was a man whom no race save the French could produce, and whose traits, career, and success lie hopelessly beyond the comprehension of the Anglo-Saxon. Bred a watchmaker, he had the skill, when a mere youth, to invent a clever escapement balance for regulating watches; had he been able to insert it into his own brain he might have held more securely his elusive good fortunes. From being an ingenious inventor he became an adventurer ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... in the dining room the German watchmaker was winding up the clock. Stepan Arkadyevitch remembered his joke about this punctual, bald watchmaker, "that the German was wound up for a whole lifetime himself, to wind up watches," and he smiled. Stepan Arkadyevitch was fond of a joke: "And maybe she will come round! That's a good expression, ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... whether that hair was a wig or the Duchess's—the faded Oriental shawl which was fastened beneath her chin and which fell over her thin, bent chest. There was O'Flaherty, the good-natured policeman on the beat. There was the old watchmaker next door. There was Black Hurley, the notorious gang leader, who sometimes swaggered into the district like a dirty and evil feudal lord. There was a Jewish pushcart peddler, white-bearded and skull-capped. There ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... "tripod of life" a French physiologist called these three organs. It is all clear enough which leg of the tripod is going to break down here. I could tell you exactly what the difficulty is;—which would be as intelligible and amusing as a watchmaker's description of a diseased timekeeper to a ploughman. It is enough to say, that I found just what I expected to, and that I think this attack is only the prelude of more serious consequences, —which expression means you very ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... hand holding a dagger," he said, "but it's too small for me to see whether it has three fingers or four. Evan, will you run round with it to the little watchmaker's in the next street, and ask him to look at it with one of the glasses he sticks in his eye when he is at work, and to tell you whether it has three ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... apprenticeship wanted. Indeed there is no room for such apprenticeship. It is an art which no one teaches; there is no professor who, in a dozen lessons, even pretends to show the aspirant how to write a book or an article. If you would be a watchmaker, you must learn; or a lawyer, a cook, or even a housemaid. Before you can clean a horse you must go into the stable, and begin at the beginning. Even the cab-driving tiro must sit for awhile on the box, and learn ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... boat, and my satchel had taken water enough to spoil my paper collars and a dozen cigars. My greatest calamity on that night was the sudden and persistent stoppage of my watch. An occurrence of little moment in New York or London was decidedly unpleasant when no trusty watchmaker lived within four ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... so much annoyed in my life as on the day when Annie, my only servant, gave me a month's "warning." That was four years ago; and she gave up cooking for me to marry a young watchmaker down at the town—a youth of no mark save for a curious distortion of the left eyebrow (due to much gazing through a circular glass into the bowels of watches), a frantic assortment of religious convictions, a habit of playing the fiddle ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch |
