Top 100 Invention Quotes
#1. 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
#2. It is the powerful who know how to honour, it is their art, their domain for invention.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#3. Do you have a problem? Think carefully! Is it really a problem or is it just your mind's invention, your mind's exaggeration? Is your problem really a problem? Think carefully, because mostly it is not!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#4. Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention ...
Wallace Stegner
#5. For there's nothing we read of in torture's inventions, Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions.
James Russell Lowell
#6. Change is no modern invention. It is as old as time and as unlikely to disappear. It has always to be counted on as of the essence of human experience.
James Rowland Angell
#7. Feminine virtue is nothing but a convenient masculine invention.
Ninon De L'Enclos
#8. I figured out that art would be the perfect place for me because what's encouraged is the invention of languages.
David Altmejd
#9. A lie is troublesome, and sets a man's invention upon the rack, and one trick needs a great many more to make it good.
Richard Steele
#10. Necessity is not merely the father of invention; it is the father of courage.
Michael Josephson
#12. Man's survival, from the time of Adam and Eve until the invention of agriculture, must have been precarious because of his inability to ensure his food supply.
Norman Borlaug
#13. The business model for content is to be paid for it. You can be paid for it either though advertising or subscriptions or some new invention, but right now what we've got is advertising revenue and subscription revenue as the only way to be paid for content.
Barry Diller
#14. We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.
H.G.Wells
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Everyone was going crazy, like they'd just witnessed the birth of Jesus and the invention of electricity at the same time. Jude was a rock star, their savior, and they were paying him homage.
Nicole Williams
#18. 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
#19. I think the iPhone was as significant an invention as the Gutenburg press, in terms of the future of humanity.
James Woods
#20. John Locke invented common sense, and only Englishmen have had it ever since!
Bertrand Russell
#21. Besides, a long poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the Polar star of Poetry, as Fancy is the sails - and Imagination the rudder.
John Keats
#22. We can only continue to promote invention, creativity and success by asking of ourselves, our situations and problems some key questions. What questions are you asking today?
Archibald Marwizi
#23. Hope is a strange invention - A Patent of the Heart - In unremitting action Yet never wearing out
Emily Dickinson
#24. 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
#25. I don't know if fury can compete with necessity as the mother of invention, but I recommend it.
Gloria Steinem
#26. Whoever invented God is an idiot. God is absolutely man's worst invention.
Chris Lowe
#27. Memory belongs to the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer which records things; it is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention.
Alain Robbe-Grillet
#28. One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.
Henry Miller
#29. To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#30. A patent, or invention, is any assemblage of technologies or ideas that you can put together that nobody put together that way before. That's how the patent office defines it. That's an invention.
Dean Kamen
#31. If one cannot invent a really convincing lie, it is often better to stick to the truth.
Angela Thirkell
#32. 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
#33. Ever since the arrival of printing - thought to be the invention of the devil because it would put false opinions into people's minds - people have been arguing that new technology would have disastrous consequences for language.
David Crystal
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. Skype is a wonderful invention. It might be my favorite thing because I get to see my family and the ones that you love.
Jamie Lawson
#38. On historical you take the known facts, dramatize them, and then stitch them together by invention. It's a projective thing.
William Monahan
#39. 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
#40. What people can excel our Northern and New England brethren in skill, invention, activity, energy, perseverance, and enterprise?
John C. Calhoun
#41. 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
#42. The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.
Douglas Engelbart
#43. What makes up a life; events or the recollection of events?
How much of recollection is invention?
Whose invention?
Jeanette Winterson
#44. The easiest way to discover the purpose of an invention is to ask the creator of it. The same is true for discovering your life's purpose: Ask God.
Rick Warren
#45. The steam-engine I call fire-demon and great; but it is nothing to the invention of fire.
Thomas Carlyle
#46. If there's a new idea, a new invention, or a new gas, or a new whatever you know, It should be brought at least into the open instead of carrying these same old burdens around with you.
Jimi Hendrix
#47. The promise of business is to increase the general well-being of humankind through service, a creative invention and ethical philosophy.
Paul Hawken
#48. 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
#49. Andrade [who was looking after wartime inventions] is like an inverted Micawber, waiting for something to turn down.
Henry Tizard
#50. I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention ... arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.
Agatha Christie
#51. Mothers are a biological necessity; fathers are a social invention
Margaret Mead
#52. 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
#53. 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
#55. 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
#57. Did anyone know anything at all, or finding times when the truth didn't suit them, had they all been repeating falsehoods and nonsense for so long they no longer remembered what was fact and what was invention?
Edward W. Robertson
#58. 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
#59. With the advent of computing, human invention crossed a threshold into a world different from everything that came before. The computer is the universal machine almost by definition, machine-of-all-trades, capable of accomplishing or simulating just about any task that can be logically defined.
James Gleick
#60. Men are rather beholden ... generally to chance or anything else, than to logic, for the invention of arts and sciences.
Francis Bacon
#61. Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.
Igor Stravinsky
#63. Excel spreadsheets might as well be one of the most dangerous recent inventions.
Rolf Dobelli
#64. But I hate things all fiction ... there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric - and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.
Lord Byron
#65. What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.
Toni Morrison
#66. The practice of narrative and argument does not lead to invention, but it compels a certain coherence of thought.
Jean Piaget
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. And what's life if it isn't invention? Starting with inventing yourself.
John Le Carre
#70. I didn't fail 1000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1000 steps.
Thomas A. Edison
#71. It's fun to invent systems and meanings and then poke holes in them.
Marty Rubin
#72. Necessity, oftener than facility, has been the mother of invention; and the most prolific school of all has been the school of difficulty.
Samuel Smiles
#73. Realize that a drawing is not a copy. It is a construction in very different materials. A drawing is an invention.
Robert Henri
#74. The whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.
Oscar Wilde
#75. Modern invention has been a great leveler. A machine may operate far more quickly than a political or economic measure to abolish privilege and wipe out the distinctions of class or finance.
Ivor Brown
#76. Sugar-free ice pops are an invention of God. They hardly have any calories since they're mostly water. I eat about 15 pops every two days.
Gene Simmons
#77. The market came with the dawn of civilization and it is not an invention of capitalism ... If it leads to improving the well-being of the people there is no contradiction with socialism.
Mikhail Gorbachev
#78. Home is an invention on which no one has yet improved.
Ann Douglas
#79. We have a process that continually looks back to him for guidance, but it also combines that with a tremendous amount of discovery and invention, as well, because of the demands of the medium and the opportunities of the medium.
Christopher Meledandri
#80. 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
#81. The concept of war crimes is an American invention.
George Wald
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't want one.
Jon Krakauer
#85. 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
#86. I've got a new invention. It's a revolving bowl for tired goldfish.
Lefty Gomez
#87. 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
#88. Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity
Vladimir Nabokov
#89. A love story - your own, or anyone else's - is interior, hidden. It can never be accurately reported, only imagined. It is all dreams and invention. It's guesswork.
Joan Wickersham
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. Graphic design, which evokes the symmetria of Vituvius, the dynamic symmetry of Hambidge, the asymmetry of Mondrian; which is a good gestalt, generated by intuition or by computer, by invention or by a system of coordinates, is not good design if it does not communicate.
Paul Rand
#94. Television has some lovely aspects to it - and some ghastly aspects - but the theater itself was a wonderful invention.
Patrick Macnee
#95. 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
#96. Mark the spirit of invention everywhere, thy rapid patents, Thy continual workshops, foundries, risen or rising, See, from their chimneys how the tall flame-fires stream.
Walt Whitman
#97. It is with epigrams as with other inventions; the best ones annoy us because we didn't think of them ourselves.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#98. Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.
William James
#99. The ball is man's most disastrous invention, not excluding the wheel.
Robert Morley
#100. It is my contention that no other invention of man has brought greater chaos to humanity than the practice of religion.
Paul Winchell
