Quotes about craftsman (47 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”

Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) Catholic saint and founder of the Franciscan Order

This quote was actually composed by Louis Nizer, and published in his book, Between You and Me (1948).
Misattributed
Variant: He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.

Heart

“There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.”

Emile Zola (1840–1902) French writer (1840-1902)

Letter to Paul Cézanne (16 April 1860), as published in Paul Cézanne : Letters (1995) edited by John Rewald.

Men

“Das Werk lobt den Meister. (German: The work proves the craftsman.)”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

“A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist.”

Oscar Wilde book The Soul of Man under Socialism

The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

People , Beauty , Art

“I wanted to be considered a good craftsman. I wanted my dresses to be constructed like buildings, molded to the curves of the female form, stylizing its shape.”

Christian Dior (1905–1957) French fashion designer

Source: Gokhan Bu, in The Master Of The Haute Couture’s Museum http://hearttoexplain.com/2011/06/06/balenciaga-museum/, Balenciaga Museum, 6 June 2011

“I do what many dream of, all their lives,
— Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,
And fail in doing. I could count twenty such
On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,
Who strive — you don't know how the others strive
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat —
Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,
(I know his name, no matter) — so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.
There burns a truer light of God in them,
In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain,
Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt
This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine.”

Robert Browning Men and Women

"Andrea del Sarto", line 70
"Less is more" is often misattributed to architects Buckminster Fuller or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It is something of a motto for minimalist philosophy. It was used in 1774 by Christoph Martin Wieland.
Men and Women (1855)

God , Painting , Light , Dreams

“Who makes the world? Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. Perhaps it simply is, has been, will always be there…a clock without a craftsman.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

World

“They claim their labours are to build a heaven yet their heaven is populated with horrors. Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. A clock without a craftsman. It's too late. Always has been, always will be…too late.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

World

“You weren't an accident. You weren't mass produced. You aren't an assembly-line product. You were deliberately planned, specifically gifted, and lovingly positioned on the earth by the Master Craftsman.”

Max Lucado (1955) American clergyman and writer

Source: The Christmas Candle

“If you want to love what you do, abandon the passion mindset (“what can the world offer me?”) and instead adopt the craftsman mindset (“what can I offer the world?”).”

Cal Newport (1982) American computer scientist

Source: So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

Love , World , Passion

“Specks—specks all over the third panel, see?—no, that one—the second one up from the floor and I wanted to point this out to someone yesterday but a photo shoot intervened and Yaki Nakamari or whatever the hell the designer's name is—a master craftsman not—mistook me for someone else so I couldn't register the complaint, but, gentlemen—and ladies—there they are: specks, annoying, tiny specks, and they don't look accidental but like they were somehow done by a machine—so I don't want a lot of description, just the story, streamlined, no frills, the lowdown: who, what, where, when and don't leave out why, though I'm getting the distinct impression by the looks on your sorry faces that why won't get answered—now, come on, goddamnit, what's the story?”

Bret Easton Ellis book Glamorama

Glamorama (1998)

Photo , Hell

“As vampire movies go, few are more memorable than Nosferatu, which is not only the first screen version of Dracula, but, in some ways, remains the best. Unlike many of his predecessors who dabbled in the vampire genre, Murnau was a craftsman, and the care he lavished upon this production is evident in each shot and every scene. Alongside The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, few motion pictures have had a more profound impact upon an entire genre than Nosferatu has had upon the legion of horror movies that trailed in its wake.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/movies/n/nosferatu.html of Nosferatu (1922).
Three-and-a-half star reviews

Way

“The craftsman is in his own craft beguiled.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Lo schermitor vinto è di schermo.
Canto XIX, stanza 14 (tr. Fairfax)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

“For neither talent without instruction nor instruction without talent can produce the perfect craftsman.”
Neque enim ingenium sine disciplina aut disciplina sine ingenio perfectum artificem potest efficere.

Vitruvius book De architectura

Neither natural ability without instruction nor instruction without natural ability can make the perfect artist.
Morris Hicky Morgan translation
Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter I, Sec. 3; translation by Frank Granger

Perfection

“In conceptual art the idea or the concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive; it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman.”

Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) American artist

Source: Quotes of Sol Lewitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," 1967, p. 80. Cited in: Diane Waldman. Carl Andre https://archive.org/stream/carlandre00wald#page/7/mode/1up. Published 1970 by Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. p. 7

Art , Idea , Decision , Dependency

“I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything. I was in the workshop and watched him. So as a child so-called art was not my view. That was, in my opinion, my father's job. But I liked to watch him; he comes, as my mother also, from a very craftsman's background. My father's parents were carpenters. They were also builders partly. They were painters. And several of them were very, active in the theater and all such nonsense, you know. On my mother's side there was much more heavy craft. They were blacksmiths. They made a specialty horse shoes and nails for them... So, as a child, my main fun was to watch others working. I loved to walk to the neighboring carpenter's place and up to the neighboring shoemaker in my home town.”

Josef Albers (1888–1976) German-American artist and educator

Homage to the square' (1964), Oral history interview with Josef Albers' (1968)

Love , Art , Shoe , Home

“The skills of the modern artist are the opposite of those of the craftsman: instead of acquiring techniques for producing classes of objects, the artist today perfects the means suited to his particular work.”

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

Source: Art & Other Serious Matters, (1985), p. 51, "Inquest into Modernism"

Perfection

“Down in the basement
I have a Craftsman lathe.
Show it to the children
When they misbehave.”

Warren Zevon (1947–2003) American singer-songwriter

"Model Citizen", written by Warren Zevon, LeRoy Marinell, and Waddy Wachtel
Mr. Bad Example (1991)

Children

“[You've said your material chooses you. ] That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman—-the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.”

Truman Capote (1924–1984) American author

From a 1968 interview
Truman Capote: Conversations (1987)

Art

“Painting, in the beginning, was a trade like any other. Some men became picture-makers as others became glaziers or carpenters. Painters painted shields, saddles and banners. The primitive painter was more of a craftsman than we are; he learned his trade superlatively well before he thought of letting himself go. The reverse is true today.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

13 January 1857 (p. 339)
1831 - 1863, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1847 – 1863)

Men , Learning , Painting

“A good craftsman doesn't blame his tools.”

Keith Olbermann (1959) American sports and political commentator

Catch Phrases
Source: http://www.sportscenteraltar.com/phrases/phrases.asp Sports Center Catchphrases

“Maybe the years I spent playing the piano in taverns in Chicago and elsewhere led me to believe that the people who did that mundane work were as important to an understanding of art as the better-known players who produced the recognized classics of jazz. Growing up … may have led me to think that the craftsman who help make art works areas important as the people who conceive them… Learning the "Chicago tradition" of sociology from Everett C. Hughes and Herbert Blumer surely led to a skepticism about conventional definitions of the objects of sociological study.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Source: Art Worlds (1982), p. ix.

People , Art , Understanding , Thinking

“Be a craftsman in speech that thou mayest be strong, for the strength of one is the tongue, and speech is mightier than all fighting.”

Ptahhotep Ancient Egyptian vizier

The Maxims of Ptahhotep (c. 2350 BCE)

Strong , Fight

“In all base schools of art, the craftsman is dependent for his bread on originality; that is to say, on finding in himself some fragment of isolated faculty, by which his work may be distinct from that of other men. We are ready enough to take delight in our little doings, without any such stimulus; — what must be the effect of the popular applause which continually suggests that the little thing we can separately do is as excellent as it is singular; and what the effect of the bribe, held out to us through the whole of life, to produce — it being also in our peril not to produce — something different from the work of our neighbors?”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

Lecture II, section 32.
The Eagle's Nest (1872)

Life , Men , School , Art

“I'm not "filled with my art". I ain't got no art. I've got only a kind of craftsman's skill, and make stories as I make biscuits or embroider underwear or wrap up packages.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Letter to Guy Moyston (June 25, 1925).

Art

“Potter bears a grudge against potter, and craftsman against craftsman, and beggar is envious of beggar, and bard of bard.”

Hesiod book Works and Days

Source: Works and Days (c. 700 BC), line 25.

“Pride in one’s work carries with it a determination to accept the demands imposed by that work: in the case of philosophy to follow the argument where it leads, in the case of history to discover what actually happened, in the case of literature to explore to its depths a particular theme. In consequence, this sort of pride demands freedom: it has to be laid low in any authoritarian State. The historian, in such a system, has to conform to official interpretations of the past, the philosopher to dogmas, the writer to stereotypes of human action, the craftsman to “production-schedules.” More subtly, attempts are made to lay pride low in a consumer’s society: the film-director, the novelist, the craftsman are called upon to produce “what will sell” at whatever cost to their pride in workmanship.”

John Passmore (1914–2004) Australian philosopher

Source: The Perfectibility of Man (1971), p. 290.

History , Literature , Freedom , Past

“Benjamin Black is a craftsman and these are crafted works. I'm very proud of them. I think they're well made, but Banville is doing something else – he's trying to make a kind of poetry, I suppose. I'm a perfectionist. It's an illness but a good illness. It's a completely different method of writing. Banville writes with a fountain pen on paper in a manuscript book and Black works straight on to the screen. It could take me a whole morning to write a few sentences as Banville, but as Black I'd be very annoyed if I didn't have at least two or three pages done. This drives crime-writers crackers because they think I'm saying that their craft is not worth it. I'm simply saying it's a different thing. I don't know why they worry when I talk about speed; after all, Georges Simenon wrote his books in about 10 days.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)

Books , Thinking , Speed

“The stinking puddle from which usury, thievery and robbery arises is our lords and princes. They make all creatures their property— the fish in the water, the bird in the air, the plant in the earth must all be theirs. Then they proclaim God's commandments among the poor and say, "You shall not steal." They oppress everyone, the poor peasant, the craftsman are skinned and scraped.”

Thomas Müntzer (1489–1525) early Reformation-era German pastor who was a rebel leader during the German Peasants' War

Letter to the Princes, as cited in Transforming Faith Communities: A Comparative Study of Radical Christianity, p. 173 http://books.google.com/books?id=6FRJAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA173

(de) Sieh zu, die Grundsuppe des Wuchers, der Dieberei und Räuberei sein unser Herrn und Fürsten, nehmen alle Kreaturen zum Eigentum: die Fisch im Wasser, die Vögel in der Luft, das Gewächs auf Erden muß alles ihr sein (Jes. 5). Darüber lassen sie dann Gottes Gebot ausgehen unter die Armen und sprechen: »Gott hat geboten: Du sollst nicht stehlen.

Bird , God , Fish , Water

“If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it.”

Noel Coward (1899–1973) English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer

Sheridan Morley, A Talent to Amuse (1985).

Chance

“My father was a really good craftsman – he was a silversmith – so I grew up understanding how things were made. That’s something that’s easy to take for granted, but everything that has been made has been thought about, designed, and I think that growing up with an appreciation of the nature of objects was hugely influential to me.”

Jonathan Ive (1967) English designer and VP of Design at Apple

Vogue: "Quiet By Design: Naomi Campbell Interviews Jony Ive" (2 April 2018)

Understanding , Nature , Thinking

“A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.”

Louis Nizer (1902–1994) American lawyer

Between You and Me, Beechurst Press, 1948.

Heart

“many seemingly independent businessmen or craftsman are more or less well paid retainers of larger corporations, such as the cobbler, operating a United States shoe machine or an automobile dealer holding a license of the General Motors Corporation.”

Paul A. Baran (1909–1964) American Marxist economist

Source: The Political Economy Of Growth (1957), Chapter Four, Standstill and Movement Under Monopoly Capitalism, II, p. 84

Shoe

“With a father who is a fabulous craftsman, I was raised with the fundamental belief that it is only when you personally work with a material with your hands, that you come to understand its true nature, its characteristics, its attributes, and I think – very importantly – its potential.”

Jonathan Ive (1967) English designer and VP of Design at Apple

Dezeen: "Fewer designers seem to be interested in how something is actually made" says Jonathan Ive https://www.dezeen.com/2016/05/03/fewer-designers-interested-in-how-something-is-made-jonathan-ive-apple-manus-x-machina/ (3 May 2016)

Understanding , Nature , Thinking , Personality

“Before the age of adulteration it was held that behind each work there stood some conception of its perfect execution. It was this that gave zest to labor and served to measure the degree of success. To the extent that the concept obtained, there was a teleology in work, since the laborer toiled not merely to win sustenance but to see this ideal embodied in his creation. Pride in craftsmanship is well explained by saying that to labor is to pray, for conscientious effort to realize an ideal is a kind of fidelity. The craftsman of old time did not hurry, because the perfect takes no account of time and shoddy work is a reproach to character. But character itself is an expression of self-control, which does not come of taking the easiest way. Where character forbids self-indulgence, transcendence still hovers around. When utilitarianism becomes enthroned and the worker is taught that work is use and not worship, interest in quality begins to decline. … There is a difference between expressing one’s self in form and producing quantity for a market with an eye to speculation. Péguy wished to know what had become of the honor of work. It has succumbed to the same forces as have all other expressions of honor.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), pp. 73-74.

Age , Way , Effort , Time

“Self-projection is, more often than not, the move of the minor craftsman, of the tactics of the hour whose inherent weakness is, precisely, that of originality.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 3 (p. 170).

“There is those hearts, reader, that never mend again once they are broken. Or if they do mend, they heal themselves is a crooked and lopsided way, as if sewn together by a careless craftsman.”

Kate DiCamillo book The Tale of Despereaux

The Tale of Despereaux (2004)

Way , Heart

“I am not an artist and never have been. Rather I am like a craftsman and feel very close to the mediaeval artisans who produced their work anonymously and who, along with their apprentices, had a true feeling for the physical materials they were working with.”

Werner Herzog (1942) German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and opera director

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

Feeling

“You as a Fascist stand for the small trader against the chain-store; for the peasant against the usurer; for the nation, great or small, against the super-state; for personal business against Big Business; for the craftsman against the Machine; for the creator against the middleman; for all that prospers by individual effort and creative toil, against all that prospers in the abstract air of High Finance or of the theoretic ballyhoo of Internationalism.”

Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) writer and painter

British Union Quarterly, 1937.

Business , Effort , Personality

“I was too aggressive. I should not have been so foolish. I am a craftsman in baseball. I look like rookie.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

Speaking after the 1972 NLCS, as quoted in "Puerto Rico Has Lost a Hero" by Bob Addie, in The Washington Post (Tuesday, January 2, 1973), p. D2
Baseball-related, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1972</big>

“As for 'story' I never yet did enjoy a novel or play in which someone didn't tell me afterward that there was something wrong with the story, so that's going to be no drawback as far as I'm concerned. "Good Lord, why am I so bored"—"I know; it must be the plot developing harmoniously." So I often reply to myself, and there rises before me my special nightmare—that of the writer as craftsman, natty and deft.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Letter 104, to Forrest Reid, 19 June 1912
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

“The sweetest teaching did he introduce,
Concealing truth under untrue speech.
The place he spoke of as the gods' abode
Was that by which he might awe humans most, —
The place from which, he knew, terrors came to mortals
And things advantageous in their wearisome life —
The revolving heaven above, in which dwell
The lightnings, and awesome claps
Of thunder, and the starry face of heaven,
Beautiful and intricate by that wise craftsman Time, —
From which, too, the meteor's glowing mass speeds
And wet thunderstorm pours forth upon the earth.”

Euripidés (-480–-406 BC) ancient Athenian playwright

Sisyphus as translated by R. G. Bury, and revised by J. Garrett

Life , God , Truth , Beauty

“A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.”

W. H. Auden book Forewords and Afterwords

"A Poet of the Actual", p. 265
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
Context: A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it. But it is unbecoming in an artist to talk about inspiration; that is the reader's business.

“None but a Craftsman can judge of a craft.”

Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher

The Sayings of the Wise (1555), p. 161

“What nonsense! I’m given these things to make a pattern out of. Something gave it to me.
I’ve always loved the idea of the craftsman, the anonymous man.”

P. L. Travers (1899–1996) Australian-British novelist, actress and journalist

The Paris Review interview (1982)
Context: You know C. S. Lewis, whom I greatly admire, said there’s no such thing as creative writing. I’ve always agreed with that and always refuse to teach it when given the opportunity. He said there is, in fact, only one Creator and we mix. That’s our function, to mix the elements He has given us. See how wonderfully anonymous that leaves us? You can’t say, “I did this; this gross matrix of flesh and blood and sinews and nerves did this.” What nonsense! I’m given these things to make a pattern out of. Something gave it to me.
I’ve always loved the idea of the craftsman, the anonymous man. For instance, I’ve always wanted my books to be called the work of Anon, because Anon is my favorite literary character. If you look through an anthology of poems that go from the far past into the present time, you’ll see that all the poems signed “Anon” have a very specific flavor that is one flavor all the way through the centuries. I think, perhaps arrogantly, of myself as “Anon.” I would like to think that Mary Poppins and the other books could be called back to make that change. But I suppose it’s too late for that.

Love , Idea

“I think that the best of artists are androgynous in a sense. If a man is a very macho male, I don't know whether he'll make a very good director, he may make a very good craftsman. Or if a woman is a very sort of typically feminine woman, I don't think she will make a very good film. She has to have a bit of both.”

Aparna Sen (1945) Indian filmmaker, script writer and actress

Rendezvous with Simi Garewal, Rendezvous with Simi Garewal - Aparna Sen & Konkana Sen - 24 Mar 2014 (First Broadcast 2003), at 7 Min 51 Sec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkkOKmyld5k

Sense , Thinking , Making love

“It is not enough for the economist in a free society to be a good economic craftsman; he must also think and act as a citizen.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, An Economist Looks At the Peace (1945)

Thinking