Quotes & Sayings About Workshop

The world is God's workshop; the raw materials are His; the ideals and patterns are His; our hands are "the members of Christ," our reward His recognition. Blacksmith or banker, draughtsman or doctor, painter or preacher, servant or statesman, must work as unto the Lord, not merely making a living, but devoting a life. This makes life sacramental, turning its water into wine. This is twice blessed, blessing both the worker and the work. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

I was fascinated by the effects that could be achieved by editing. The cutting room became a magic workshop for me. — Leni Riefenstahl

This'll keep me safe, Mother! I've the knowing of the sliding rule! I can tell the sine what to do, and the cosine likewise and work out the tangent of t'quaderatics! Come one, Mother, stop fretting and come wi' me now to t'barn. You must see 'er!' Mrs. Simnel, reluctant, was dragged by her son to the great open barn he had knitted out like the workshop back at Sheepridge, hoping against hope that her son had accidentally found himself a girl. — Terry Pratchett

The Continent will not suffer England to be the workshop of the world. — Benjamin Disraeli

If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the war, it's Workshop. After Youth, that is. — Kingsley Amis

Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I think that, in principle, a workshop is such a beautiful idea - an environment in which writers who are collectively apprenticed to the craft of writing can come together in order to collectively improve. — Eleanor Catton

One of my favorite things is when I get letters and video messages from fans or people who have attended one of my workshops that say things like "because of your workshop, I finally have the confidence to go after my dream/love myself/have the strength not to listen to anyone telling me I can't do the things I really want to do!" — Rachele Brooke Smith

He has impressed upon our natures or states - must be an imitation of God incarnate: our model is the Jesus, not only of Calvary, but of the workshop, the roads, the crowds, the clamorous demands and surly oppositions, the lack of all peace and privacy, the interruptions. For this, so strangely unlike anything we can attribute to the Divine life in itself, is apparently not only like, but is, the Divine life operating under human conditions. — C.S. Lewis

In the realm of Greater Understanding, the workshop is dismantled after the work is finished. — Idries Shah

She had thought the chewing and digesting were meant literally and wondered, horrified, why Mo had hung on his workshop door the words of someone who vandalized books. — Cornelia Funke

Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom with the enclosing force of horizons: no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past, without near-diagnostic physical description; no image undissolved into regulation Updikean metaphor; no overture without a dramatized scene to 'show' what's 'told'; no denouement prior to an epiphany whose approach can be charted by and Freitag on any Macintosh. — David Foster Wallace

There is something infinitely dingy about the word workshop. Pray that England doesn't become a nation of workshopkeepers. — Jilly Cooper

Resa longed for the kitchen, always full of the humming of the oversize fridge, for mo's workshop in the garden, and the armchair in the library where you could sit and visit strange worlds without getting lost in them — Cornelia Funke

Take it as a lie - or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. — H.G.Wells

[Hobie]"Theo." His hug was strong and parental, and so fierce that it made me cry even harder. Then his hand was on my shoulder, heavy anchoring hand that was security and authority itself; he was leading me in, into the workshop, dim gilt and rich wood smells I'd dreamed of, up the stairs into the long-lost parlor, with its velvets and urns and bronzes. — Donna Tartt

The world is God's workshop for making men in. — Henry Ward Beecher

In those days it was possible for a Greek to flee from an over-abundant reality as though it were but the tricky scheming off the imagination-and to flee, not like Plato into the land of eternal ideas, into the workshop off the world-creator, feasting one's eyes on the unblemished unbreakable archetypes, but into the rigor mortis off the coldest emptiest concept off all, the concept of being. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I went straight from the Marine Corps to the MFA. The way that you would express things among Marines is somewhat different than the way you're supposed to express things in a creative-writing workshop. — Phil Klay

That droplet of moisture that had slipped from me like a tear seemed almost to tell the story of my life. It fell through empty space, with no control whatsoever over its destiny; rolled along a path of silk; and somehow came to rest there on the teeth of that dragon. I thought of the petals I'd thrown into the Kamo River shallows outside Mr. Arashino's workshop, imagining they might find their way to the Chairman. It seemed to me that, somehow, perhaps they had. — Arthur Golden

I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn't occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn't a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do. — Meghan Daum

The next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern. — Annie Finch

A failed short story is a few weeks of fruitless work; a failed novel is a dead child. — The New York Writers Workshop

Well, you know, I played Mufasa in the workshop of The Lion King. — Keith David

No. I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie
or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what do you think of it? — H.G.Wells

My first workshop was in Rome, and that was the start of House of Waris. In a little magical atelier, a goldsmith, his apprentice, his stone setter - and that was where it began. — Waris Ahluwalia

Nature is God's workshop. The sky is his resume. The universe is his calling card. You want to know who God is? See what he has done. — Max Lucado

It would indeed be a sad misfortune if man were released from the necessity of work and struggle, for it is a well-known fact that organs which do not function atrophy; and according to the old saying, 'Idleness is the devil's workshop.' — Charles A. Beard

What you get at the BMI Workshop is the rarest commodity in New York City: Friendly criticism; people who genuinely root for you; and a chance to rewrite your work, try it again, and hone your craft. — Maury Yeston

Enough to using Texas as a political laboratory for testing far-right ideas. Enough to using Texas as a workshop for fattening the wallets of their special interest friends and supporters. And enough of politicians listening only to each other, rather than real Texans. — Wendy Davis

Mission is a workshop where there is room for all. — Pope Benedict XVI

We try to make each situation specific to the person. At the beginning of the season, we come up with, like, 50 to 100 ideas, which we workshop and then we call around to see who is interested in doing something like that. Once we find the people, we make the bid specific to them. A lot of it is about where you can get people to go physically, which is a little tricky because most actors and musicians are kind of hermits-they like to stay in their houses. — Ashton Kutcher

I enjoyed acting at school and went to an acting workshop for kids in Nottingham. It was twice a week after school and free to go to - ITV subsidised it. Every now and again, a casting director would turn up. 'Peak Practice' became a rite of passage for us. It was the first job I had. — Joe Dempsie

Good habits are not made on birthdays, nor Christian character at the new year. The workshop of character is everyday life. The uneventful and commonplace hour is where the battle is lost or won. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Democracy no longer means what it was meant to. It has been taken back into the workshop. Each of its institutions has been hollowed out, and it has been returned to us as a vehicle for the free market, of the corporations. For the corporations, by the corporations. — Arundhati Roy

To really touch something, she is learning - the bark of a sycamore tree in the gardens; a pinned stag beetle in the Department of Etymology; the exquisitely polished interior of a scallop shell in Dr. Geffard's workshop - is to love it. — Anthony Doerr

I just think that the world of workshops - I've written a poem that is a parody of workshop talk, I've written a poem that is a kind of parody of a garrulous poet at a poetry reading who spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the poem before reading it, I've written a number of satirical poems about other poets. — Billy Collins

What was once considered impossible is now quite easily achieved. Kings and lords come and go and leave nothing but statues in a desert, while a couple of young men tinkering in a workshop change the way the world works. — Terry Pratchett

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children. — Oscar Wilde

I don't go online when I'm writing - that's the devil's workshop - but in general, I'm on there as much as any other global citizen. — Stacey D'Erasmo

I try something new every night. It's an hour show; if it works I maybe try it a few more times and then move that off and try something new. It's a great workshop for me. — Kate Clinton

We are all blessed ones. Heaven is no longer in the clouds. It is right here, all around us, everywhere; we must only open our eyes to see it. — Kim Chestney

"Stuffed and Unstrung" started as a workshop, actually, classes within our company. We found that our puppeteers were not ad libbing as well as traditionally, Jim Henson Company puppeteers have. We're sort of famous for going off script a little bit and ad libbing. — Brian Henson

Third, for people who aren't doing it already, take classes - they're worthwhile. Workshops or classes - a workshop is where you do actually get feedback on your work, not just something where you go and sit for a day. — Octavia Butler

I decided I would open this little actors' workshop I always told actors to look for. That gave me something to do on Wednesday nights, and after about a year of that, I realized that some of the things I was saying to actors probably had broader application. I ran into a magazine called 'Speakers For Free.' — Robert Forster

When I do a workshop, there is always at least one author who comes up afterward and asks if I'll take a look at his or her book and consider blurbing it. For some reason, I can turn someone down in e-mail, but when he or she is looking me in the eye, I cave. — M.J. Rose

There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring. — Marilyn Hacker

Mavis.' He paled a bit. 'Eve, tell me you're not going shopping with Mavis.'
His reaction brightened her mood a little. 'She has this friend. He's a designer.'
'Dear Christ.'
'She says he's mag. Just needs a break to make a name for himself. He has a little workshop in Soho.'
'Let's elope. Now. You look fine.'
Her grin flashed. 'Scared?'
'Terrified.'
'Good. Now we're even.' Delighted to be on level footing, she leaned in and kissed him. 'Now you can worry about what I'll be wearing on the big day for the next few weeks. Gotta go.' She patted his cheek. 'I'm meeting her in twenty minutes.'
'Eve.' Roarke grabbed for her hand. 'You wouldn't do something ridiculous?'
She tugged her way free. 'I'm getting married, aren't I? What could be more ridiculous? — J.D. Robb

Arbogast had then assembled a dream team of creative consultants and contractors to help make his bold claim a reality, luring some of the videogame industry's brightest stars away from their own companies and projects, with the sole promise of collaborating on his groundbreaking new MMOs. That was how gaming legends like Chris Roberts, Richard Garriott, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Gabe Newell, and Shigeru Miyamoto had all wound up as consultants on both Terra Firma and Armada - along with several big Hollywood filmmakers, including James Cameron, who had contributed to the EDA's realistic ship and mech designs, and Peter Jackson, whose Weta Workshop had rendered all of the in-game cinematics. — Ernest Cline

There's like a special group of people that come from different parts of the planet to study with me. It's nice. I just gave a workshop in Boston at the New England Conservatory, which was really nice. — Charlie Haden

Philosophy, certainly, is some account of truths the fragments and very insignificant parts of which man will practice in this workshop; truths infinite and in harmony with infinity, in respect to which the very objects and ends of the so-called practical philosopher will be mere propositions, like the rest. — Henry David Thoreau

Believe me, I understand how fiendishly the Internet can tempt a body to indulge in diversion from one's responsibilities, more commonly known as iniquity. Idle hands are never the devil's workshop more than when those recumbent mitts are resting upon a computer keyboard. — Nick Offerman

An idle brain is the Devil's workshop, they say. It is an absurdly incongruous statement. If the Devil is at work in a brain it certainly is not idle. And when one considers how brilliant a personage the Devil is, and what very fine work he turns out, it becomes an open question whether he would have the slightest use for most of the idle brains that cumber the earth. — Mary MacLane

The imagination is the workshop of the soul, where all the plans for individual achievement are shaped. — Napoleon Hill

So they told us all about how other kids were deceived by their parents, how the toys the grown-ups claimed were made by little elves wearing bell caps in their workshop at the North Pole actually had labels on them saying MADE IN JAPAN. — Jeannette Walls

Even before it opened its retail arm, Beigh was renowned among pashmina cognoscenti for the quality and complexity of the work produced in its workshop, a large, airy, sunlit rectangle of a room directly across from its second-floor shop. — Hanya Yanagihara

I have to say, speaking from experience, just because an actor starts out in a role in the workshop, they won't necessarily play it when it goes to Broadway. — Megan Hilty

Another well-known study, led by Nancy Andreasen, used structured interviews and matched control groups to examine thirty writers at the prestigious University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Eighty percent of the writers met formal criteria for a major mood disorder, compared with thirty percent of controls matched for age, education, and sex. — Joshua Wolf Shenk

I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad. — Justin Cronin

The sin and the shame and the sorrow, The crime and the want and the woe That are born there in your workshop, No hand can paint, you know ... — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Praise the green earth. Chance has appointed her home, workshop, larder, middenpit. Her lousy skin scabbed here and there by cities provides us with name and nation. — Basil Bunting

I came to writing because I joined the North Clare Writers' Workshop, which met every week at Ennistymon Library. — Kate Thompson

The maids in my village talked of falling in love with a man at first sight. That has always seemed naught but foolishness to me. Until I enter Sister Serafina's workshop. It is unlike anything I have ever seen, full of strange sights and smells, and I tumble headlong into love. — R.L. LaFevers

33/ Though now that I think about it, the workshop that day was probably focused on revision, as in Your First Draft Sucks and You Have a Thousand Do-Overs Before You Get It Right. Think of it this way: Build a city, then blow it up to save it. Invent a road to take you far out of town, then start over with one good brick. — Kim Addonizio

Back of the beating hammer By which the steel is wrought, Back of the workshop's clamor The seeker may find the thought. — Berton Braley

I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class. — Bharati Mukherjee

Aesthetic and utilitarian considerations aside," I said, "Those mittens don't particularly make sense. Why would you want to hitchhike to the North Pole? Isn't the whole gimmick of Christmas that there's home delivery? You get up there, all you're going to find is a bunch of exhausted, grumpy elves. Assuming, of course, that you accept the mythical presence of a workshop up there, when we all know there isn't even a pole at the North Pole, and if global warming continues, there won't be any ice, either."
"Why don't you just fuck off?" the woman replied. Then she took her mittens and got out of there. — Rachel Cohn

May I have a workshop at Alver? For experiments? If I promise faithfully not to blow the house up? If you please, Cousin Alverstoke ... ? — Georgette Heyer

I did ballet and gymnastics, and then I started acting when I was eight - just doing amateur theater at a place called Oldham Theatre Workshop in my hometown. — Olivia Cooke

The imagination is literally the workshop wherein are fashioned all plans created by man. — Napoleon Hill

Look, cell phone geolocation data shows very few clustering anomalies for this hour and climate. And that's holding up pretty much across all major metro areas. It's gone down six percentage points since news of the Karachi workshop hit the Web, and it's trending downward. If people are protesting, they aren't doing it in the streets." He circled his finger over a few clusters of dots. "Some potential protest knots in Portland and Austin, but defiance-related tag cloud groupings in social media put us within the three-sigma rule - meaning roughly sixty-eight percent of the values lie within one standard deviation of the mean. — Daniel Suarez

It is hard to believe, but the phrase 'workshop of the world' was originally coined for Britain, which today, according to Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, has 'no industry'. Having successfully launched the Industrial Revolution before other countries, Britain became such a dominant industrial power by the mid nineteenth century that it felt confident enough to completely liberalize its trade (see Thing 7). In 1860, it produced 20 per cent of world manufacturing output. In 1870, it accounted for 46 per cent of world trade in manufactured goods. The current Chinese share in world exports is only around 17 per cent (as of 2007), even though 'everything' seems to be made in China, so you can imagine the extent of British dominance then. — Ha-Joon Chang

It does no one any good to say their novel sucks if you don't have an idea how to make it better, how to approach it from different angles and make it work. It's obviously a subjective process, right? But the thing about subjectivity, at least in the classroom, is that you're banking on your professor's subjectivity to be both personal and professional - that he or she has some sense about the world outside the workshop. — Tod Goldberg

The ability to workshop in stand-up comedy is incomparable to any art form, in my opinion. — Mike Birbiglia

My first plays were amazingly bad, but I had a teacher who thought I had promise, and he kept working with me. I finally went to a summer workshop before my senior year with people like Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornes who encouraged me to write from my subconscious, and suddenly all this material about culture clash came out. — David Henry Hwang

It argued a special genius; he was clearly a case of that. The spark of fire, the point of light, sat somewhere in his inward vagueness as a lamp before a shrine twinkles in the dark perspective of a church; and while youth and early middle-age, while the stiff American breeze of example and opportunity were blowing upon it hard, had made the chamber of his brain a strange workshop of fortune. This establishment, mysterious and almost anonymous, the windows of which, at hours of highest pressure, never seemed, for starers and wonderers, perceptibly to glow, must in fact have been during certain years the scene of an unprecedented, a miraculous white-heat, the receipt for producing which it was practically felt that the master of the forge could not have communicated even with the best intentions. — Henry James

The comments you'll get from a filmmaker about your performance are going to be very different. My writing workshop is about mixing it up, cross-pollinating, not only in genres but in occupations. — Sandra Cisneros

[T]he young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. — William Faulkner

And he still had those two big nuts in his pocket that he'd picked up from the Purdys' barn workshop, the one with the green-and-yellow overspray on the floor, a green-and-yellow spray that didn't match the hard green and yellow of the John Deere, but did match the green and yellow of fair fire hydrants . . . and those nuts in his pocket. Why would you need a whole bag of big nuts, but no bolts? You wouldn't - unless they were shrapnel. And that nagging intuition he'd had by the Varied Industries building: he'd been walking by fire hydrants all morning, the same yellow and green as the overspray on the Purdys' barn floor. A bomb. The Purdys had built a bomb. The farm kid who'd been brain-injured by IEDs in Iraq had built himself an IED. A bomb disguised as a fire hydrant that was probably standing on the Concourse, right where the candidates would be marching by, right on the curb. — John Sandford

Read a ton. Take a workshop course so you learn to give and get criticism. — Jodi Picoult

Someone from the Internet Writing Workshop sent me a link to the Gender Genie, where you paste in a section of text and it uses an algorithm to detect whether the author is male or female. Or, if you're an author, you can tell whether you're really nailing your opposite-sex characters. I mean, nailing their dialog. — Max Barry

I met Kevin when I was 19, at a Second City workshop. We were paired up together in the first class I went to. By the end of the class we formed our improv group, and over the next three years we performed leading up to the formation of The Kids in the Hall. — Dave Foley

When I did musicals in London a number of years ago, I was in a workshop scenario for a year or more with 'Bombay Dreams.' — Raza Jaffrey

In the late 1600s the finest instruments originated from three rural families whose workshops were side by side in the Italian village of Cremona. First were the Amatis, and outside their shop hung a sign: "The best violins in all Italy." Not to be outdone, their next-door neighbors, the family Guarnerius, hung a bolder sign proclaiming: "The Best Violins In All The World!" At the end of the street was the workshop of Anton Stradivarius, and on its front door was a simple notice which read: "The best violins on the block." — Freda Bright

the more interesting their conversation, the more cultured they are, the more they will be trapped into thinking that they are effective at what they are doing in real business (something psychologists call the halo effect, the mistake of thinking that skills in, say, skiing translate unfailingly into skills in managing a pottery workshop or a bank department, or that a good chess player would be a good strategist in real life). — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

What I get on a yoga mat, and from a yoga teacher, has been more beneficial onstage than any other workshop I've ever done. — Jason Mraz

Most married couples spend the whole day apart, the woman in the house, the man in the office or study or workshop. — George Bernard Shaw

We live in a time when the values of courage and honesty, particularly for women writers, equate to confessing only the darkest, most painful parts of our lives. "How brave you are," my students say to each other over workshop tables, "to expose that." Meaning, to uncover this family secret or that heinous act or to openly confront the demons of alcoholism, promiscuity, substance abuse, incest, infidelity, illness, betrayal ... I have also wrestled many dark angels, and continue to do so, so I acknowledge the price such writing exacts. But more and more I have come to respect the honesty and courage required to recognize the bright angels when they appear in our memory, and to allow them equal space in our narratives. — Rebecca McClanahan

One job of the unconscious is to act as a workshop for rough-shaping ideas; crafting notions as new parts or tools become available; storing observations until something relevant appears in the landscape
generally soaking, simmering, and incubating ideas. Gradually, while combing through its inventory, it finds bits and pieces that create a pattern. When it slips knowledge of that pattern to the conscious mind, it's a surprise, like a telegram slid under the door. — Diane Ackerman

He [the writer] must, teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and compassion and sacrifice. See Poets & Writers — William Faulkner

The common workshop goal is revision, not suicide. — Hilma Wolitzer

Living in the world of the workshop, which I do as a teacher, you have to be articulate about craft. And that often involves imposing analysis on work that's in a pretty raw state. — K.M. Soehnlein

All those invisible presences ... began to transform themselves into companions that were more or less volatile, more or less intense, companions that I'd have to learn to live with. They invaded my mind when I was alone, in the silent evenings toiling away in the workshop between patterns and bastings, when I went to bed or in the gloom of the living room ... — Maria Duenas

One day God felt he ought to give his workshop a spring-clean ... . It was amazing what ragged bits and pieces came out from under his workbench as he swept. Beginnings of creatures, bits that looked useful but had seemed wrong, ideas that he'd mislaid and forgotten ... . There was even a tiny lump of sun. He scratched his head. What could be done with all this rubbish? Ted Hughes, "Leftovers," from The Dreamfighter — Cornelia Funke

Provided that the City of London remains, as it is at present, the clearing-house of the world, any other nation may be its workshop. — Joseph Chamberlain

I didn't go to acting school, so it was great to be able to rehearse for a month or two, to workshop, and be with a director who even gave me acting exercises. — Charlotte Gainsbourg

Bill Muller was a tall grey-haired man with an apparently high level of vitality despite incessant cigarette smoking. Holding everyone's attention by his forceful personality, he described his invention as a way to make a heavy wheel carry strong magnets past electricity-inducing copper coils without needing to fight the electrical drag force which usually opposes rotation and limits how efficient a generator can be. His wheel didn't have any "stuck" position; it moved freely.
"We have a magnetically balanced flywheel."
In his basement workshop, Bill showed us the beginnings of a permanent-magnet generator. — Jeane Manning

What we try to do in TSAW, which is Tasha Smith Actors Workshop, is to help the actor get to the core of who they really are and how they really feel. So, we may have them do a dump, where you just basically express everything that you feel that you have not been able to express, whether it's good, bad, or ugly. — Tasha Smith

As soon as realized that I was treating MPD clients, I read the few existing books on the condition, attended a workshop at the Justice Institute, and used some sexual abuse prevention money to organize a workshop where therapists could exchange information and educate each other about dissociation. There, I learnt something that I found really shocking. Many people
suffering from MPD had been severely abused throughout their childhood years by organized groups, including Satanic and other "dark-side" religious cults. Moreover, quite a few of them were still involved in those groups, although they were not aware of their involvement, because it was other "personalities" - dissociated parts of them - who went off to the groups' rituals. I was skeptical, to say the least. — Alison Miller

[The screw machine] was on the principle of the gauge or sliding lathe now in every workshop throughout the world; the perfection of which consists in that most faithful agent gravity, making the joint, and that almighty perfect number three, which is in harmony itself. I was young when I learned that principle. I had never seen my grandmother putting a chip under a three-legged milking-stool; but she always had to put a chip under a four-legged table, to keep it steady. I cut screws of all dimensions by this machine, and did them perfectly. (1846) — David Wilkinson