Liberty Hyde Bailey Quotes

Make the workmanship surpass the materials.

To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there's no such thing as perfect.

Whatever I do, I hope it's quality, I hope it's something that's class.

What interests me about clocks is that everything is hand-made, and yet to the person looking at the clock, something magical is happening that cannot be explained unless you are the clockmaker.

In football as in watchmaking, talent and elegance mean nothing without rigour and precision.

A pattern is a guide or a model. Patterns are used in sewing and knitting, in wood and metalworking, and in a wide variety of other productive pursuits, activities, and jobs. Patterns help to avoid waste and unwanted deviations and facilitate uniformity that is appropriate and beneficial.

My great-grandfather Melvin had been a carpenter - so was my father - and they taught me the value of tools: saws, hammers, chisels, files and rulers. It all dealt with conciseness and precision. It eliminated guesswork. One has to know his tools, so he doesn't work against himself.

Quality is pride of workmanship.

One of my primary objects is to form the tools so the tools themselves shall fashion the work and give to every part its just proportion.

Generally speaking, if you control matter more precisely, you can get more efficiency out of any process.

I have always believed in quality work.

Nintendo is a company of Kyoto craftsmen, and what we don't want to do is, if we know we can make something better, we don't want to leave that behind.

Even the details of a rifle, which are nothing but mechanical, if they are made carefully, with attention, become beautiful, satisfying.

I've got my speed, my precision. I have tools. I'm going to use them.

A workman who wants to do his work well must first prepare his tools.

Sometimes I could quit paint and take to charring. It must be fine to clean perfectly, to shine and polish and know that it could not be done better. In painting that never occurs.

It is always cheaper to do the job right the first time.

The tool user, provided the tool is made well, need not, and indeed should not, know anything about the tool.

Tools were made and born were hands, Every farmer understands.

A man and his tools make a man and his trade.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction - a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the muse.

Just as words in their proper places form sentences, each individual strike must be done in the proper order to get the desired result: a flat stone blade.

It is not enough to get things done; they must be done right.

The difference between the novice and the master is simply that the novice has not learnt, yet, how to do things in such a way that he can afford to make small mistakes. The master knows that the sequence of his actions will always allow him to cover his mistakes a little further down the line. It is this simple but essential knowledge which gives the work of a master carpenter its wonderful, smooth, relaxed, and almost unconcerned simplicity.