"Watchmaker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... went out of business back in the '80s, or it is a new movement, the material for which has not yet been placed on the market. This state of affairs leads to makeshifts, and they in turn lead to botch work. The watchmaker who does not possess the experience or necessary qualifications to make a new balance staff and make it in a neat and workmanlike manner, is never certain of having exactly what is needed, and cannot ...
— A Treatise on Staff Making and Pivoting • Eugene E. Hall
... the early proceedings of the Congress of the United States. Thomas Godfrey, the second, died after having given the most promising indications of an elegant genius for pathetic and descriptive poetry. He was an apprentice to a watchmaker, and had secretly written a poem, which he published anonymously in the Philadelphia newspaper, under the title of "The Temple of Fame." The attention which it attracted, and the encomiums which the Provost ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... no real objection to the argument or illustration to say, as we often have said, that it does not account for the watchmaker. The object of the argument from design is to prove the existence of a designer: not to explain that existence. Indeed, it would be suicidal to the whole argument in its relation to Theism, ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... him all was suavity and decorous bienseance. That lively sense of benefits to be received made the Irish Anacreon wink with both his little eyes. In the judgment of a liberal like Mr. Moore, were not the errors of a lord excusable? But with poor Rousseau the case was very different. The son of a watchmaker, an outcast from boyhood up, always on the perilous edge of poverty,—what right had he to indulge himself in any immoralities? So it is always with the sentimentalists. It is never the thing in itself that is bad or good, but the thing in its relation ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... watch and the watchmaker is inapplicable to a Being absolute, infinite and eternal. It is, moreover, only another way of explaining nothing. For to say that the world is as it is and not otherwise because God made it so, while at the same time we do not know for what reason He ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... It would only be a question of a fine, and binding me over to good behaviour on bail. Could I find bail? That was the only question. And while we still discussed it we found amongst the callers a respectable and well-to-do watchmaker from Geneva, who had been entreated (no doubt from Becke's) to do all that was needful on my behalf. I might be of good cheer; there was no reasonable doubt but that I should be released, but ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... time, that the implications, the connections, the relations to the industrial world, will be made clear. A man who makes, year after year, but one small wheel in a modern watch factory, may, if his education has properly prepared him, have a fuller life than did the old watchmaker who made a watch from beginning to end. It takes thirty-nine people to make a coat in a modern tailoring establishment, yet those same thirty-nine people might produce a coat in a spirit of "team work" which ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... watchmaker in Cowfold. He lived, not in the central square or market-place of the town, for a watchmaker's business in Cowfold was scarcely of sufficient importance for such a position, but two or three doors round ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... 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 for the purpose of studying the working ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... and darkness. The "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 ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... garnished with a pair of well-formed and well-coloured lips, which, when he laughed, disclosed a range of teeth strong and well set, and as white as the very pearl. Such was the elder apprentice of David Ramsay, Memory's Monitor, watchmaker, and constructor of horologes, to his Most ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... is of a convert, His watch of the work of grace within his heart, The watchmaker is Jesus Christ our Lord, His counsel, the directions of his Word; Then convert, if thy heart be out of frame, Of this watchmaker learn to mend the same. Do not lay ope' thy heart to worldly dust, Nor let thy graces over-grow with ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... every judge and by every advocate. Costly here, it is 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 ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... with his uncle, losing his time for the most part, but learning something of drawing and something of Euclid, for the former of which he showed special inclination.[14] It was a question whether he was to be made a watchmaker, a lawyer, or a minister. His own preference, as his after-life might have led us to suppose, was in favour of the last of the three; "for I thought it a fine thing," he says, "to preach." The uncle was a man of pleasure, and as often happens in such circumstances, his ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... other day, I went into town with your father's watch, to get a new crystal put in; and when I was at the watchmaker's, I saw a curious-shaped piece of iron hanging up. I asked the man what it was. He said it was a magnet, that he kept to touch needles. Then he gave me a nail, and let me see how the magnet would attract it. He told me, too, that if I had a ...
— Rollo's Experiments • Jacob Abbott
... some of the earliest printing presses. Perhaps the most interesting of the early wares of this enterprising city were the watches. The first made in the world were manufactured here and from their shape they were called "Nuremberg Eggs." We have a story that Charles V. had a watchmaker brought in a sedan chair all the way from Nuremberg that he might have his watch repaired. Here was manufactured the first gun-lock, and here was invented the valued ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... claimed him at home, into one of the liberal professions. Sometimes the second son would follow him to college and proceed to Holy Orders, but oftener he had to content himself as apprentice to an apothecary or an attorney. The third son would, like Roger Stephen, be bound to a pewterer or watchmaker, the fourth to a mercer, and so on in a descending scale. But Roger, though the only child of a rich man, had been denied his natural ambition, and thrust as a boy into the third class. His mother had died young, and from the hour of her death (which the young man set down to harsh ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... history was curious. He had been born in Bavaria, and when a youth of twenty-two had taken an active part in the revolutionary movement of 1848. Heavily compromised, he managed to make his escape, and at first found a refuge with a poor republican watchmaker in Trieste. From there he made his way to Tripoli with a stock of cheap watches to hawk about,—not a very great opening truly, but it turned out lucky enough, because it was there he came upon a Dutch traveller—a rather famous ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... exist—and it has since been proved—another, a second gold-bearing alluvial bottom on that field, and several had tried for it. One, the town watchmaker, had sunk all his money in 'duffers', trying for the second bottom. It was supposed to exist at a depth of from eighty to a hundred feet—on solid rock, I suppose. This watchmaker, an Italian, would put men on to sink, and superintend in person, and whenever ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... circumstance—my watch was restored to the table from which it had been so mysteriously withdrawn; but it had stopped at the very moment it was so withdrawn; nor, despite all the skill of the watchmaker, has it ever gone since—that is, it will go in a strange erratic way for a few hours, and then come to a ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... gate and passed out and started down the sidewalk. Midway of the next square he overtook a man he knew—an elderly watchmaker, a Swiss by birth, who worked at Nagel's jewelry store. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of times he had passed this man upon the street. Always before he had passed him with averted eyes and a stiff nod ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... Mr Tregaskis. "And if you don't like it, the man at the shop'll change it for something of equal value." Here with a sweep of the hand he withdrew the handkerchief and disclosed the gift. "I forget the chap's name for the moment, but he's a watchmaker, and lives off the Town Quay as you turn up west-an'-by-north to the Post Office. The round mark on the lid—as p'r'aps I ought to mention—was caused by a Challenge Cup of some sort standin' upon it all ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... estimable men in this 'Third Estate,'" rejoined Vieuville. "Take that watchmaker, Joly, for instance. He was formerly a sergeant in a Flanders regiment; he becomes a Vendean chief and commander of a coast band. He has a son, a republican; and while the father serves in the ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... examined in still greater detail. Does a man merely inherit manual skill, let us say, or does he inherit the precise kind of manual skill needed to make a surgeon but not the kind that would be useful to a watchmaker? Is a man born merely with a generalized "artistic" ability, or is it one adapted solely for, let us say, music; or further, is it adapted solely for violin playing, not for ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... slave trade, as was then alleged, purchased a young boy slave for one hundred roubles, the average price of the human article in Bokhara, and brought him to St. Petersburg. The boy was subsequently apprenticed to a Tartar watchmaker, and later became a convert to the Russian church. According to a letter in the Russian Official Gazette, the young Ameer's decree, finally freeing all the bondmen within his dominion, was ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... at once out of bed, and had his own doctor called; but what could he do? Then they sent for a watchmaker, and after a good deal of talking and looking, he got the bird into some sort of order; but he said that it must be looked after a good deal, for the barrels were worn, and he could not put new ones in in such a manner that the music would go. There was a great to-do; only once in a ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... "Caracteres" after a close re-perusal of one of the most readable books in all literature, is its extraordinary sustained vitality. It hums and buzzes in our memory long after we have turned the last page. We may expand the author's own mage, and compare it, not with a clock, but with a watchmaker's shop; it is all alive with the tick-tick of a dozen chronometers. La Bruyere's observations are noted in a manner that is disjointed, apparently even disordered, but it was no part of his scheme to present his maxims in a system. We shall ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... study I was destined for the priesthood. Moreover, I was of sedentary habits and too weak of muscle to distinguish myself in athletic sports. I had an uncle of a Voltairian turn of mind, who did not at all approve of this. He was a watchmaker, and had reckoned upon me to take on his business. My successes were as gall and wormwood to him, for he quite saw that all this store of Latin was dead against him, and that it would convert me into a pillar of the Church which he ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... assembled. Miller, the broad man, an exceptional second-hand bookseller who knew the insides of books, had at least grand-parents who called themselves German, and possibly far-away ancestors who denied themselves to be Jews; Buchan, the saddler, was Scotch; Pash, the watchmaker, was a small, dark, vivacious, triple-baked Jew; Gideon, the optical instrument maker, was a Jew of the red-haired, generous-featured type easily passing for Englishmen of unusually cordial manners: and Croop, the dark-eyed shoemaker, was probably more ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... in the street a little confused. "It is evident," he murmured, as he stalked along, "that the Abbe Gevresin is a clever spiritual watchmaker. He has dexterously taken to pieces the movement of my passions, and made the hours of idleness and weariness strike, but, after all, his advice comes only to this: stew in your own ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... ruffians, who wanted to carry him home in triumph; but he did not choose to go without being legally released, and returning into the committee room, he learnt for the first time the name of his preserver, one Monnot, a watchmaker, who, though knowing him only by character, and learning that he was among the clergy who were being driven to the slaughter, had rushed ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that had been left them by 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
... covenant God of his people requires it."—Anti-Slavery Magazine, Vol. i, p. 73. "He as a patriot deserves praise."—Hallock's Gram., p. 124. "Thomson the watchmaker and jeweller from London, was of the party."—Bullions, E. Gram., p. 128. "Every body knows that the person here spoken of by the name of the conqueror, is William duke of Normandy."—Murray's Gram., 8vo, p. 33. "The words myself, thyself, himself, herself, and their plurals ourselves, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Franz, had been a watchmaker and mender in an old- fashioned country town, and he had made such a comfortable fortune by the business, that he was able to retire before he grew very old; and so he bought a very pretty little villa in the outskirts ...
— Aunt Judy's Tales • Mrs Alfred Gatty
... is true. What is the error of deism? It is that it makes a God like to a man who works upon matter existing previously to his action, and who puts in operation forces independent of himself, and which he does nothing but employ. In this way a watchmaker makes a watch which goes afterwards without him, because the watchmaker only sets to work forces which have an independent existence, and which continue to act when he has ceased his labor. We work upon matter foreign to ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... Cora;—words that are quite empty. In one sense a man 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 ship ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... with calm discretion, and moving with the nice precision of a fine watchmaker, shed into the best decanter (softly as an angel's tears) liquid beauty, not too gaudy, not too sparkling with shallow light, not too ruddy with sullen glow, but vivid—like a noble gem, a brown cairngorm—with mellow ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... leave, the Millener farther informed me, that with the Assistance of a Watchmaker, who was her Neighbour, and the ingenious Mr. Powell, she had also contrived another Puppet, which by the help of several little Springs to be wound up within it, could move all its Limbs, and that she had sent it over to her Correspondent in Paris to be taught ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... watchmaker said, "I'm afraid, sir, the cost of repairing will be double what you ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... the watchmaker's getting mended,' he said with a smile. He was neither young nor handsome, but he was clever, and that goes further than either in dealing ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... makes "the grotesque supposition that the tickings and other movements of a watch constituted a kind of consciousness; and that a watch possessed of such a consciousness, insisted on regarding the watchmaker's actions as determined like its own by springs and escapements." (p. 111). The vast majority of men, instead of agreeing with Mr. Spencer in this matter, will doubtless heartily, each for himself, join the German philosopher Jacobi, in saying, "I confess to Anthropomorphism ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... damper heads, and all small wooden parts are liable to break or come unglued. The watchmaker's screwdriver, the binding wire and the glue must always be at hand for these emergencies. These breaks are generally in places where wrapping is not permissible, and you are compelled to drill. Keep the screwdriver well sharpened and ...
— Piano Tuning - A Simple and Accurate Method for Amateurs • J. Cree Fischer
... Rousseau was born in Geneva, Switzerland. His father was a watchmaker, and upon him devolved the education of the boy, as the mother died in childbirth. Rousseau's father was a man of dissipated habits, careless of responsibility, and of very violent temper. He interested himself in his son far enough to teach him to read, and supplied him with the worthless novels ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... was a good-looking young fellow who went by the name of Ted. He was supposed to be a watchmaker and jeweler by trade—a working jeweler—but he spent most of his time at the public which Burden now adorned, and though he certainly did not carry on his trade there, always appeared to have as much ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... wears a red, finely-striped silk cloth from his waist to his knees, and a blue-and-white handkerchief on his head. He has apparently the good of his people as well as the glory of his kingdom at heart, and is encouraging foreign merchants, and especially artisans to settle in his capital. A watchmaker at this moment could obtain any favour he should ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... by the system varies like the demands of other machines in accordance with the amount of work which is to be performed. A plowman, other things being equal, consumes more than a watchmaker; just as a locomotive burns more fuel than the little engine that runs a sewing machine; the strong able-bodied active man, one who works his brains and muscles up to their full power, eats more than the weak, emaciated and inactive girl, who passes all her time in the recumbent ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... could produce waves in the air, it is evident that the waves it would produce would be of the same period as those whose motions it would take up or absorb most completely, if they struck against it. Perhaps the most curious effect of these timed impulses ever described was that observed by a watchmaker, named Ellicott, in the year 1741. He left two clocks leaning against the same rail; one of them, which we may call A, was set going; the other, B, not. Some time afterwards he found, to his surprise, that B was ticking also. The pendulums ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Minister, a charming man with a freebooter's face, for our passports, and then back to Dr. Ob. The motor was going off at 6.30 he said. We cheered internally, for we were getting tired of Cettinje, which reminded us of a watchmaker's wife with her best silk dress on. On our way downstairs we called in to thank the Minister of War for our jolly trip; and he wished ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... This week he was claiming he used to be a watchmaker before he began to shake. The week before, he'd said he was a brain surgeon. A woman I didn't know, a real old Boxcar Bertha, dragged herself over and began some kind of story about how her sister married a Greek, but she passed out before we found ...
— The Altar at Midnight • Cyril M. Kornbluth |
