"Craftsmanship" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and short poems no adequate count can here be made. Yet, I cannot pass without a word, if only in a word may I indicate, the admirable craftsmanship and playful dexterity of the lines on A Pretty Woman; the pathetic feeling and the exquisite and novel music of Love in a Life and Life in a Love; the tense emotion, the suppressed and hopeful passion, of In Three Days, and the sad and haunting song of In a Year, with ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... 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 horror of the eyes that no ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... include two-dimensional and three-dimensional works of fine, graphic, and applied art, photographs, prints and art reproductions, maps, globes, charts, technical drawings, diagrams, and models. 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 pictorial, ...
— Copyright Law of the United States of America: - contained in Title 17 of the United States Code. • Library of Congress Copyright Office
... with red, some barred with blue. Most, however, 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 value, were not ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... the nave show a complete absence of uniformity, some being carved with figures, and others with leaves or intricate line ornament. To obtain an adequate impression of all the fantastic imagination expressed in these capitals, and the craftsmanship brought to bear upon the carving, it is necessary to climb to the triforium galleries. The aisle windows are narrow and placed high in the wall. The interest of the exterior is centred upon the bas-relief ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... boyish work is not a disparagement of Wagner: one might as well, indeed, disparage Shakespeare, or Beethoven, or the sun and all the stars in heaven. The symphony tells us, as plainly as words could tell, two things. First, that as far as craftsmanship is concerned he fell between two stools: had his aim been lower, it would have been also less confused, and the result would have turned out better. That is, had he thought only of composing a well-constructed symphony, with skilful, easy-running counterpoint, ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... makes and bends his own bow, after all; it is only the unsuccessful suitors for the honors of poetic craftsmanship who complain of its difficulties. Something of our contemporary impatience with fixed stanzaic forms is due perhaps to the failure to recognize that the greater poets succeed in making over every kind of poetic pattern in the act of employing it, just as a Chopin minuet differs from a Liszt minuet, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... "Clubs?" 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 the water into the hold. Similarly ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... 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. ...
— Wood-Block Printing - A Description of the Craft of Woodcutting and Colour Printing Based on the Japanese Practice • F. Morley Fletcher
... qualities in the painting which evade analysis by a mere amateur, and yet involve supreme craftsmanship—such things as precision of line, perfect mastery of the palette, clever brush-work, management of shadow, perspective, proportion, and relation of the parts to the whole; but I leave all that to the professionals whose business it is to appreciate it; what strikes ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... down. Half 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 ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... which shines on the edge of night and morning. All things were transfigured in her light. Before her the grass grew greener and more glittering and rare flowers started in her way. A silver basket of most delicate craftsmanship, the work of some cunning cerd, was on her right arm. It shone clear and sparkling against her mantle which was exceedingly lustrous, many times folded, darkly crimson, and of substance unknown. She towered above her aged companion, straight as a pillar of red yew in ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... 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 to ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... admit that he had not shown himself a master of dramatic craftsmanship. Faulty the piece no doubt is in several particulars. The soliloquies of Franz are too long-winded, and the same may be said of some of the robber-scenes. Spiegelberg's vulgar tongue is allowed to wag too freely. Contempt of quotidian probability is now and then carried ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... 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 ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... pleased with the job and craved approval for his craftsmanship from a man who still knew good writing when he saw it, even though he ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... inaugurated in German letters in 1890 by Stefan George, who gathered about him a small group of collaborators in the privately circulated magazine Blaetter fuer die Kunst. It stood for a remoteness from reality which formed a strong contrast to the naturalistic creed and for a formal craftsmanship which set out to counteract the grooving tendency to break away from the fetters of conventional forms. The work of the group bordered often upon archaic preciosity, yet its influence was wholesome in holding ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... 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 ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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 ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... of this. I tried, with bent brows, to resolve the discord. But I did not take my failure as wholly incompatible with a meaning in Soames's mind. Might it not rather indicate the depth of his meaning? As for the craftsmanship, "rouged with rust" seemed to me a fine stroke, and "nor not" instead of "and" had a curious felicity. I wondered who the "young woman" was and what she had made of it all. I sadly suspect that Soames could not have made more of it than she. Yet even now, if one doesn't try to make any sense ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm
... almost the only things in the house which the habitant and his 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
... work. Not to appreciate Mr. Conrad's 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 then hammering ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... 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 ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... their attention to the features of the city and landscape through which they passed. It wasn't pleasing particularly to Terran tastes, but Cameron guessed that it represented a considerable accomplishment to the Markovians. Stone appeared to be the chief building material, and, while the craftsmanship was exact, the lines of the structures lacked the grace of the Greek and Roman monuments of which ...
— Cubs of the Wolf • Raymond F. Jones
... of craftsmanship were once beautiful, unwittingly or not, they are now divided into two kinds, works of art and non-works of art: now nothing made by man's hand can be indifferent: it must be either beautiful and elevating, or ugly and degrading; and those things that are without art are so aggressively; they wound ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... hand, oil and wine needing far less labour than grain-crops and offering longer leisure (which for Greeks meant the chance to start doing something else), the contemporary revelation of mineral wealth, and of many forms of craftsmanship, again largely (though not wholly) introduced from oversea, created another source of wealth, no less 'limitless' and dangerously unmanageable, in a world where wealth of any kind was literally 'so little good'. And this industrial wealth, like its commercial counterpart, was personal ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... most generally known represents the much later period of the "Keltic" sonata—a fact which will, however, be sufficiently evident to anyone who studies the two versions carefully enough to perceive the difference between more or less experimental craftsmanship and ripe and heedful artistry. The observer will notice in these pieces, incidentally, the abandonment of the traditional Italian terms of expression and the substitution of English words and phrases, which are used freely and with adroitness to indicate every shade of the composer's meaning. In ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... in 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 valuable ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... successors it becomes an end. For the man who has little to say the manner of saying it gains consequence, and in a manner which has been elaborated into an intricate craft the greatest emotions cannot be expressed. The circle is vicious. With the exaltation and elaboration of craftsmanship expression first falls into neglect and then becomes impossible. Those who are not content to marvel at cleverness, but still ask emotion of art, must be satisfied with such as craftsmen can supply. If pictures no longer express feeling they may ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... factual premises so different from M. France's as prunes from prisms, and yet, being the work of equally great artists, they would, doubtless, have struck us as equally true. Is not, then, the positive finality of "Le Lys Rouge," though expressed in terms of a different craftsmanship, the same, in essence, as the negative finality of the "Bergeret" volumes? Are not both, in fact, merely flower of author true to himself? So long as the scent, colour, form of that flower is strong and fine enough to affect the senses of our spirit, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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 Berlioz ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... new force about the story, a kind of master-craftsmanship and mental dominance that ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... every attempt at artistic representation by the hand of man after a brief lapse of time loses its truth and becomes motionless and impassive like the face of a corpse. So far superior to all pictorial art in respect of truthful representation is the craftsmanship of the smooth mirror and ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... you that you are now engaged upon a senseless task. You remind me of the Pelopaeus, {21} who used to coat with mud the place on the wall whence her nest had been removed. You speak to me, in your own fashion, of a strange psychology which is able to reconcile the wonders of a master craftsmanship with aberrations ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... 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 in adversity, of suffering patiently ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... in the great streets are the fine Vienna shops exposing elegant craftsmanship of many kinds. Here you can buy rich glass, leather-work, enamelled silver, worked ivory, lace, beautiful bindings, fans, house-ornaments of every conceivable kind in ultra-perfect taste. All that is for sale suggests a luxurious way of life—aristocratic and cultured existence, ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... 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
... this country (then in a state of wildest barbarism) for tin left in exchange a knowledge of the arts and appliances of civilisation hitherto not understood. The Roman Invasion (45 B.C.) brought not only knowledge of craftsmanship but also Christianity. St. Augustine, to whom the conversion of the Britains is credited, carried with him a banner embroidered with the image of Christ. After the Romans had left the country, and ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... by her lover's side with the sun on it. "And Mark rewed therefore." The story, especially in its completion with the "Iseult of Brittany" part and the death of Tristram, gives scope for every possible faculty and craftsmanship of the most analytic as of the most picturesque novelist of modern times. There is nothing in the least like it in ancient literature; and to get a single writer who would do it justice in modern times we should have to take the best notes of Charles Kingsley, and Mr. Blackmore, and ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... great type of the practically executive craftsman, and the inventor of expedients in craftsmanship, (as distinguished from Prometheus, the institutor of moral order in art). Daedalus invents,—he, or ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... to be a small, cubical box, something more than an inch square, fashioned of bronze and elaborately decorated with minute relief work in the best manner of ancient Indian craftsmanship. ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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 ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... towards the nave. The first great piece of metal-work of this kind executed in England in modern times was the choir screen at Lichfield, designed and carried out by the same artists as the Hereford screen; though the latter and subsequent production transcends that of Lichfield, both in craftsmanship and beauty. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... tradition. It is in one sense his personality that makes him what he is, the only actor on the English stage who has a touch of genius. But he has not gone to himself to invent an art wholly personal, wholly new; his acting is no interruption of an intense inner life, but a craftsmanship into which he has put all he has to give. It is an art wholly of rhetoric, that is to say wholly external; his emotion moves to slow music, crystallises into an attitude, dies upon a long-drawn-out word. He appeals to us, to our sense ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons |
