Artisanal Work Quotes

Everything is sold to skill and labor; and where nature furnishes the materials, they are still rude and unfinished, till industry, ever active and intelligent, refines them from their brute state, and fits them for human use and convenience.

A plea for the spinning wheel is a plea for recognizing the dignity of labour.

I have always regarded manual labour as creative and looked with respect-and, yes, wonder-at people who work with their hands. It seems to me that their creativity is no less than that of a violinist or painter.

Often when I talk about what I do, making isn't just this inevitable function tacked on at the end.

The workman in the true sense of the word - the artist in guns - is either extinct, or hidden in an obscure corner. There is no individuality about modern guns. One is exactly like another.

To his and everybody else's way of thinking, you should build a house with your own hands before you start talking about being an engineer.

You find me at work; excuse the dust on my blouse. I sculpt my marble myself.

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.

There are mothers who sew for six months to make a fashion collection - someone's grandmother, someone's sister. We come in and get paid to walk for 10 minutes at the end. Whenever I think about that, I realise it's not about me. I was just the one chosen to represent those women and sell the clothes.

Hands make the world each day.

Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality.

When I arrive in Los Angeles in the entertainment community, and I use implements like a shovel and a hammer, our society has distanced itself so far from working with its hands that those incredibly pedestrian skills are perceived as somehow being extraordinary.

Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.

You cannot, by all the lecturing in the world, enable a man to make a shoe.

150 years ago in [Charles] Dickens's time there was at least a sense of craft. So some of the things people had inside of them, they had the possibility of expressing in the making of things - even in a daily way with their clothes or their food. People made a good deal of both themselves. Now our daily lives are almost all consumption. Craft plays a tiny role.

I love the culture of animation. What stop-motion has in common with live-action is that it has many of the same departments. There's hair, costume, makeup in the form of paint, gaffers, electricians. So there's the same sense of real stuff, real light. But it's not like everything happens at once, like it does in live-action. It's all subdivided into these small sets. It's where my strengths are. Live-action is just an utterly different world, and I'm not a public enough persona to be big and loud at the front of the ship. I'd rather more quietly interact with the artisan animators.

It is a tragedy of the first magnitude that millions of people have ceased to use their hands as hands. Nature has bestowed upon us this great gift which is our hands. If the craze for machinery method continues, it is highly likely that a time will come when we shall be so incapacitated and weak that we shall begin to curse ourselves for having forgotten the use of the living machines given to us by God.

I believe in the honest craft of workmen.

I love being around people who work with their hands, who do the hard things to keep our country going. They're just my kind of people.

The very idea of making shoes by hand boggled her mind.

I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.

A carpenter is known by his chips.

Everything I do is a direct creation of my hands, whether it is made in wood, plaster or clay.

Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing for long years. And for this reason, some old things are lovely warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.

My unrealized ambition is to tend my vines, produce wine, and work like an artisan. I dream of rediscovering the old traditions and customs of wine growing, not necessarily to deny the technology which we have today, but to harness it and work in harmony with nature.