In Invention Quotes

#1. Some people really want to play Mozart and be just performers. I was more interested in invention.

Steve Lacy

#2. What interests me is starting businesses on our own, finding ideas that we can support, and simply investing in invention.

Barry Diller

#3. Intellectual Ventures is a company that invests in invention.

Nathan Myhrvold

#4. Let art, then, imitate nature, find what she desires, and follow as she directs. For in invention nature is never last, education never first; rather the beginnings of things arise from natural talent, and ends are reached by discipline.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#5. The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.

Donald Barthelme

#6. For there's nothing we read of in torture's inventions, Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions.

James Russell Lowell

#7. Any actor, any playwright who's worked a life in the theater knows how to do things cheaply and quickly. It's just all by necessity. Invention is everything.

Israel Horovitz

#8. Nothing was anything until someone defined it. Nothing was inevitable. Nothing was inviolate. Everything existed, perhaps, by the act of faith, and we were always in the midst of creating our world, complete with the trappings of tradition that was nothing more than an invention like all the rest.

Anne Rice

#9. With an absurd oversimplification, the 'invention' of the calculus is sometimes ascribed to two men, Newton and Leibniz. In reality, the calculus is the product of a long evolution that was neither initiated nor terminated by Newton and Leibniz, but in which both played a decisive part.

Richard Courant

#10. I think the iPhone was as significant an invention as the Gutenburg press, in terms of the future of humanity.

James Woods

#11. Hope is a strange invention - A Patent of the Heart - In unremitting action Yet never wearing out

Emily Dickinson

#12. So without that Canadian invention we were grounded. And so that was a really important and key part of the mission and Canadians should take real pride in it.

Chris Hadfield

#13. Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person's eyes.

Oliver Sacks

#14. it was not so much the new machines that revolutionized the world, impressive and important as they were. The truly heroic invention was the economic, social, and political institutions in which these machines were embedded.

Sven Beckert

#15. In literature and art memory is a synonym for invention. It is the life-blood of imagination, which faints and dies when the veins are empty.

Robert Aris Willmott

#16. I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, human liberty as the source of national action, the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas

John F. Kennedy

#17. What people can excel our Northern and New England brethren in skill, invention, activity, energy, perseverance, and enterprise?

John C. Calhoun

#18. The model I came up with in 1964 is just the invention of a rather strange sort of medium that looks the same in all directions and produces a kind of refraction that is a little bit more complicated than that of light in glass or water.

Peter Higgs

#19. In the modern world we have invented ways of speeding up invention, and people's lives change so fast that a person is born into one kind of world, grows up in another, and by the time his children are growing up, lives in still a different world

Margaret Mead

#20. The patent system was established, I believe, to protect the lone inventor. In this it has not succeeded. ... The patent system protects the institutions which favor invention.

Ernst Alexanderson

#21. From this haunting feeling of being not wanted, which remained a recurrent haunt through life, I found two ways of escape, both of which in changing form also persisted. One was the invention of gods, the other was personal efficiency in work.

Anna Louise Strong

#22. I've always thought sleep was a wonderful invention. Not that being awake isn't nice too, of course. But when I get up in the morning, I think, boy, only fourteen more hours and I can be back to sleep again ... And I never dream, because it distracts my mind from pure sleeping ...

Anne Tyler

#23. It takes a fictionalized or invented excursion to buy a pencil in the winter dusk of London as an excuse to explore darkness, wandering, invention, the annihilation of identity, the enormous adventure that transpires in the mind while the body travels a quotidian course.

Rebecca Solnit

#24. The greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison Edison's first major invention, in 1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was invented.

Dave Barry

#25. Perhaps it wasn't all Freud after all. Perhaps a large part of it had to do with the invention of the electric light, which had killed the shadows in men's minds much more effectively than a stake through a vampire's heart - and less messily, too.

Stephen King

#26. It's fun to invent systems and meanings and then poke holes in them.

Marty Rubin

#27. Realize that a drawing is not a copy. It is a construction in very different materials. A drawing is an invention.

Robert Henri

#28. This concern for the poor is in the Gospel, it is within the tradition of the Church, it is not an invention of communism and it must not be turned into an ideology, as has sometimes happened before in the course of history.

Pope Francis

#29. I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

Michael Graves

#30. Can that which is the greatest virtue in philosophy, doubt (called by Galileo the father of invention), be in religion what the priests term it, the greatest of sins?

Christian Nestell Bovee

#31. In an approximate way, the logic of commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate.

Garrett Hardin

#32. Open marriage' is an invention of a feminist era. The idea is to have a marriage where dalliances are tolerated or even encouraged for both men and women, or in some combination where both partners are getting something out of it.

Amanda Marcotte

#33. The modernists started with the assumption that science is the only source of sure knowledge, that nature is all there is, and thus that morality is merely a human invention that can be changed to meet changing circumstances in an evolving world.

Charles Colson

#34. Life for most of us is full of steep stairs to go up and later, shaky stairs to totter down; and very early in the history of stairs must have come the invention of bannisters.

Louis Kronenberger

#35. What but a pestilential vapour can hover over society when its chief director is only instructed in the invention of crimes, or the stupid routine of childish ceremonies?

Mary Wollstonecraft

#36. Everything that we call Invention or Discovery in the higher sense of the word is the serious exercise and activity of an original feeling for truth, which, after a long course of silent cultivation, suddenly flashes out into fruitful knowledge.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#37. We are quite at ease in this no man's land of ignorance and doubt and dispute, absorbed in the ambiguities of trying to reach truth by mixing fact with invention.

Barry Unsworth

#38. While many different animal species have nervous systems that enable anticipation of events - for example, learning that a flashing light is associated with a reward in a conditioned learning experiment - planning for the future seems to be a prefrontal invention.

Daniel J. Siegel

#39. Old truths and ancient magic, revolution and invention, all conspire to distract us from the passion that in one way or another defeats us all.

Anne Rice

#40. Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion.

Thomas Paine

#41. The invention of Bob Dylan with his guitar belongs in its way to the same kind of tradition of something meant to be heard, as the songs of Homer.

Robert Fitzgerald

#42. "Painters and poets," you say, "have always had an equal license in bold invention." We know; we claim the liberty for ourselves and in turn we give it to others.

Horace

#43. Unlike the clonal longevity of asexual organisms, sexually reproduced plants and animals usually have briefer, individual life cycles. In short, the enormous diversity afforded by the evolutionary invention of sexual reproduction came with a price - death of the individual.

Richard J. Borden

#44. Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it - so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.

Cynthia Ozick

#45. In fact, death seems to have been a rather late invention in evolution. One can go a long way in evolution before encountering an authentic corpse.

George Wald

#46. Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

T. S. Eliot

#47. How thoroughly it is ingrained in mathematical science that every real advance goes hand in hand with the invention of sharper tools and simpler methods which, at the same time, assist in understanding earlier theories and in casting aside some more complicated developments.

David Hilbert

#48. Community colleges are the great American invention in terms of education,

Eduardo J. Padron

#49. When I was growing up, when I was 11 years old I was listening to The Mothers of Invention. You know, I mean I was a Frank Zappa fan in Arkansas.

Billy Bob Thornton

#50. Invention in photography is so laborious as to be in most instances perverse.

Robert Adams

#51. The poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his sneses, and the mind is no longer in him.

Plato

#52. Faith is a fine invention
When gentlemen can see,
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency.

Emily Dickinson

#53. The impact of television on our culture is ... indescribable. There's a certain sense in which it is nearly as important as the invention of printing.

Carl Sandburg

#54. The invention of the micro-loan was a big surprise to me. Who would have guessed loans of less than $20 made to poor people in undeveloped countries could create thriving local economies? And, even more surprisingly, that they more reliably pay off their debts than the wealthy of the world.

Joel A. Barker

#55. Subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the government. Discovery and invention have made it possible for the government, by means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet.

Louis D. Brandeis

#56. The Internet has destroyed irony in the world, or at least wounded it considerably. What are we to do about an invention whose end result is that starving people in China are looking up things on marthastewart?

Douglas Coupland

#57. Style is a capitalist invention. It's a trademark. It's very useful in the world of commerce to have a good trademark, but it wasn't my first concern. I got restless

Art Spiegelman

#58. Go, write it in a martial hand; be curst and brief; it is no matter how witty, so it be eloquent and fun of invention: taunt him with the licence of ink: if thou thou'st him some thrice, it shall not be amiss; and as many lies as will lie in thy shee.

William Shakespeare

#59. Nate liked money. It was a sleek and clever invention, beautiful in the way it lubricated power and focused people's attention. But it had a clumsy, brutal side, too. Money bludgeoned people without it into silence, shut them away in neighborhoods like this.

Scott Westerfeld

#60. Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers ... What we call art is a game.

Octavio Paz

#61. Ever since the invention of the camera, people have been trying to create 3D, because we see things in 3D, and everyone's aware that the camera doesn't.

Ian McKellen

#62. In my fantasy world everyone has a happy ending. No one is told who they should be, how they should feel, who they are allowed to love, what they should believe and how they should look. Sadly, everyone in my world can't seem to get along with one another because everyone is so darn different.

Shannon L. Alder

#63. Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.

Russell Baker

#64. I don't believe in depression. There's no such thing. It's an invention. It's bullshit, it's a cop out.

John Waters

#65. Exercise is the worst thing in the world and as bad an invention as gunpowder.

Horace Walpole

#66. I love what the Valley does. I love company building. I love startups. I love technology companies. I love new technology. I love this process of invention. Being able to participate in that as a founder and a product creator, or as an investor or a board member, I just find that hugely satisfying.

Marc Andreessen

#67. [In relation to business:] Invention must be its keynote-a steady progression from one thing to another. As each in turn approaches a saturated market, something new must be produced.

Reginald Fessenden

#68. The sign is determined at the moment I use it and for the object of which it must form a part. For this reason I cannot determine in advance signs which never change, and which would be like writing: that would paralyze the freedom of my invention.

Henri Matisse

#69. None of my neighbors believe in what I say. They refuse to wear the rings. They will never accept my invention until the day they die. That's what I call the real antichrists.

Alex Chiu

#70. We had a rule in Tibet that anyone proposing a new invention had to guarentee that it was beneficial, or at least harmless, for seven generations of humans before it could be adopted.

Dalai Lama

#71. The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.

Orson Welles

#72. Characters to me are like sonnets, they have limits that you obey which allow a force to enter in, an invention that makes the novel possible. Change the limits and the force leaves. The novel becomes impossible.

Alexander Chee

#73. Basically, there is nothing new in the behavior of monsters, for the monster himself is nothing more than an invention of his victims.

Kobo Abe

#74. A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

Emile M. Cioran

#75. A new and speculative idea, which although it may seem trivial and almost laughable, is nonetheless of great value in quickening the spirit of invention.

Michael J. Gelb

#76. Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter ... the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing

John Milton

#77. I live in my mind, such that whatever destroys me shall be a creature of my own invention.

Genevieve Ross

#78. Any change in form produces a fear of change, and that has accelerated. Marketing is the death of invention, because marketing deals with the familiar.

Nicolas Roeg

#79. Take man's most fantastic invention- God. Man invents God in the image of his longings, in the image of what he wants to be, then proceeds to imitate that image, vie with it, and strive to overcome it.

Eric Hoffer

#80. There's a long tradition - certainly with country, but in all kinds of genres of music - to have humorous lyrics. Certainly with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention and, if you look at country, Roger Miller and Jim Stafford.

Rick Moranis

#81. As a medical doctor who chose a career in artificial heart technology rather than clinical practice, I decided not to take an internship, which is required for licensing. Instead, I work with invention, manufacturing, regulatory affairs, and clinical application of artificial hearts.

Robert Jarvik

#82. Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers.

Wendell Phillips

#83. If you stop and think about it, the form of propulsion used today hasn't changed in over a thousand years ... since the invention of fireworks by the Chinese.

Peter Diamandis

#84. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#85. An invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started.

Tim O'Reilly

#86. Governments too steady and uniform, as they are seldom free, so are they, in the judgment of some attended with another sensible inconvenience: they abate the active powers of men; depress courage, invention, and genius; and produce a universal lethary in the people.

David Hume

#87. In the field of outdoor sports, the American boy is easily capable of devising his own amusements, and until some proof is adduced that baseball is not his invention, I protest against this systematic effort to rob him of his dues.

John Montgomery Ward

#88. Having the benefit to our society, not only here in the United States but throughout the world with the amount of invention you get from having a space program, is well worth the risk that an individual like myself has to take by flying in the vehicle.

Mark Kelly

#89. An exquisite invention this, Worthy of Love's most honeyed kiss,
This art of writing billet-doux
In buds, and odors, and bright hues! In saying all one feels and thinks In clever daffodils and pinks; In puns of tulips; and in phrases, Charming for their truth, of daisies.

Leigh Hunt

#90. Who today remembers that gasoline, the fuel of modern civilization, originated as yet another invention in search of a use?

Jared Diamond

#91. With 'Twilight,' you have these massive tomes that you have to condense. With 'Penoza,' we had an eight episode Dutch series that, just for the pilot alone, I condensed three episodes. So, there's a lot of filling in and a ton of invention that has to happen to fill out eight episodes.

Melissa Rosenberg

#92. It often puzzles me when people think that matters connected with sex ought to be suppressed. Sex itself cannot be suppressed, and the efforts to do it, it seems to me, result in greater damage than it can do itself. After all, it was not an invention of man, but of God.

Maxwell Perkins

#93. We have to find the environments in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions.

Marshall McLuhan

#94. What we see of the world is the mind's
Invention and the mind
Though stained by it, becoming
Rivers, sun, mule-dung, flies-
Can instantly shift
A dirty bird in square time

Phillip Whalen

#95. She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

#96. What passes in the world for talent or dexterity or enterprise is often only a want of moral principle. We may succeed where others fail, not from a greater share of invention, but from not being nice in the choice of expedients.

William Hazlitt

#97. Mortification from a self-strength, carried on by ways of self-invention, unto the end of a self-righteousness, is the soul and substance of all false religion in the world.

John Owen

#98. Every new discovery in science brings with it a host of new problems, just as the invention of the automobile brought with it gas stations, roads, garages, mechanics, and a thousand other subsidiary details.

Banesh Hoffmann

#99. If Christianity is a mere invention of man, and the Bible is not from God, how can infidels explain Jesus Christ? His existence in history they cannot deny. How is it that without force or bribery, without arms or money, He has made such an immensely deep mark on the world as He certainly has?

J.C. Ryle

#100. [Science fiction is] a specialized type of fantasy, in which the prime assumption usually is a new scientific discovery or invention.

Jack Williamson