Top 100 Inventor Quotes
#1. As Arkwright and Whitney were the demi-gods of cotton, so prolific Time will yet bring an inventor to every plant. There is not a property in nature but a mind is born to seek and find it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#2. The spinning wheel is itself an exquisite piece of machinery. My head daily bows in reverence to its unknown inventor.
Mahatma Gandhi
#4. I have always thought of myself as an inventor first and foremost. An engineer. An entrepreneur. In that order. I never thought of myself as an employee. But my first jobs as an adult were as an employee: at IBM, and then at my first start-up.
Aaron Patzer
#5. People talk of me as being the inventor of the legal thriller.
Scott Turow
#6. 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
#7. I'm not a great inventor from scratch. What I do is to use, steal, acquire, reproduce or re-cycle music from other musicians.
Michael Nyman
#8. I wanted to be an inventor, whatever I thought that meant then. I guess I was thinking of Edison or maybe James Watt. Or maybe even Newton.
David Antin
#9. I am not what I would consider truly a musician. I am an inventor. I am an innovator.
Kanye West
#10. Newton, of course, was the inventor of differential calculus so his place in the tale is quite special.
Kit Williams
#11. A father of the church said that property was theft, many centuries before Proudhon was born. Bourdaloue reaffirmed it. Montesquieu was the inventor of national workshops and of the theory that the state owed every man a living. Nay, was not the church herself the first organized democracy?
James Russell Lowell
#12. The ideal of perfect Success is an ideal belonging to the same sort of individual as the inventor of Equal Rights of man and Perfectibility.
Wyndham Lewis
#13. Don't be afraid to stumble. Any inventor will tell you that you don't follow a plan far before you strike a snag. If, out of 100 ideas you get one that works, it's enough.
Charles Kettering
#14. It was a little disappointing, really. As an inventor he could at least have had a hunchback assistant, or perhaps a metal one.
Kady Cross
#15. If you are an inventor, then you are destined for blood, sweat and tears.
Gary Gygax
#16. Being the inventor of sex would seem to be a sufficient distinction for a creature just barely large enough to be seen by the naked eye.
Joseph Wood Krutch
#17. It's the same old story," he would say, years later; "the inventor gets the experience, and the capitalist gets the invention.
Tim Wu
#18. It isn't easy being a brilliant inventor, always alone. Always misunderstood. Easy to turn bitter, make horrible mistakes. People are more difficult to work with than machines. And when you break a person, he can't be fixed.
-Hephaestus
Rick Riordan
#20. CALVIN:
When I grow up I want to be an inventor. First I will invent a time machine. Then I'll come back to yesterday and take myself to tomorrow and skip this dumb assignment.
Bill Watterson
#21. These are bagpipes. I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the man-made sound never equalled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig.
Alfred Hitchcock
#22. Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, said that whenever he could not see his way clearly, he knelt down and prayed for light and understanding.
Nathan Eldon Tanner
#23. Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio, believed that sound waves never completely die away, that they persist, fainter and fainter, masked by the day-to-day noise of the world. Marconi thought that if he could only invent a microphone powerful enough, he would be able to listen to ancient times.
Hari Kunzru
#24. I'm an artist; I do not destroy, but create scars. And above that, I am an inventor of new ways to create them.
Hillary Wen, Hildy Wen
#25. Who were these people, these specially selected tenants? They were mothers and fathers and children. A dressmaker, a secretary, an inventor, a doctor, a judge. And, oh yes, one was a bookie, one was a burglar, one was a bomber, and one was a mistake.
Ellen Raskin
#26. The public values the invention more than the inventor does. The inventor knows there is much more and better where this came from.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#27. If you don't know Tom Lehrer, you should - in addition to being a classical pianist, mathematician, songwriter, satirist, researcher at Los Alamos and, he claims, inventor of the Jell-O shot, he is just delightfully funny and graceful.
Rachel Sklar
#28. An invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor,
Eli Whitney
#29. The inventor, the man with a unique, specialized talent, is the only real super-genius. But he is so rare that he needs no consideration.
Charles M. Schwab
#30. I'm not an inventor. I just want to make things better.
Daniel Ek
#31. I don't mind being, in the public context, referred to as the inventor of the World Wide Web. What I like is that image to be separate from private life, because celebrity damages private life.
Tim Berners-Lee
#32. A poet is not an inventor. A poet is a player that plays with words on the field of human imagination to excite a reader's mind with the colors of emotion.
Debasish Mridha
#33. An inventor creates something that works. An entrepreneur creates something that others will buy.
Chris Brogan
#34. The inventor of the modern foundation garment that we women wear today was a German scientist and opera lover by the name of Otto Titsling.
Bette Midler
#35. Greed is the inventor of injustice as well as the current enforcer.
Julian Casablancas
#36. Having established itself securely on shipboard, the chronometer was soon taken for granted, like any other essential thing, and the whole question of its contentious history, along with the name of its original inventor, dropped from the consciousness of the seamen who used it every day.
Dava Sobel
#37. The creator gives no heed to the critic unless he becomes a barren inventor.
Khalil Gibran
#38. The inventor of the plow did more good than the maker of the first rosary - because, say what you will, plowing is better than praying.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#39. 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
#40. A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#41. You can be anything. You could be the President of the United States or the inventor of the next Internet or a ninja cardio-thoracic surgeon poet, which would be awesome because you would be the first one.
Cameron Russell
#42. Ibn Firnas was a polymath: a physician, a rather bad poet, the first to make glass from stones (quartz), a student of music, and inventor of some sort of metronome.
Lynn Townsend White Jr.
#43. A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.
Igor Stravinsky
#44. I spend my money on my props and my creations. I'm an inventor.
Lady Gaga
#45. I became an inventor by accident. I was out of the Air Force in 1956. No, no, that's not true: I went in in 1956, came out in 1959, was working at the University of Washington, and I came up with an idea, from reading a magazine article, for a new kind of a phonograph tone arm.
Woody Norris
#46. I decided to be an inventor when I was five. My parents had given me a few various enrichment toys like erector sets, and for some reason I had the idea that if I put things together just the right way, I could create the intended effect.
Ray Kurzweil
#47. I am not overly impressed by the great names and reputations of those who might be trying to beat me to an invention. It's their 'ideas' that appeal to me. I am quite correctly described as 'more of a sponge than an inventor
Thomas A. Edison
#48. You're the inventor," Klaus answered, buttoning his coat. "But you can't invent things like time,
Lemony Snicket
#49. In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool-wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis - man, the inventor of the city - we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages.
Howard Bloom
#50. O mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies, O skilled to sing of Time or Eternity, God-gifted organ-voice of England, Milton, a name to resound for ages.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#51. An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?
Ayn Rand
#52. To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in this darkness and grope towards an answer, to put up with anxiety about whether there is an answer.
Ray Dolby
#53. Every inventor is a crackpot until his idea succeeds.
Mark Twain
#54. I was a fixer, a builder - an inventor - ever since I can remember.
Tom Scholz
#56. Which was why, some six hours later, Alexia Maccon's daughter was born inside the head of an octomaton in the presence of her husband, a comatose werewolf dandy, and a French inventor.
Gail Carriger
#57. I was asked by an editor to consider writing something about an American inventor. I asked him if he knew who invented the computer. He said he didn't. In that case, I told him, I should write a book about John Vincent Atanasoff.
Jane Smiley
#59. An inventor's path is chorused with groans, riddled with fist-banging and punctuated by head scratches.
James Dyson
#60. Archimedes was my ideal. I admired the works of artists, but to my mind, they were only shadows and semblances. The inventor, I thought, gives to the world creations which are palpable, which live and work.
Nikola Tesla
#61. Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#62. People think of the inventor as a screwball, but no one ever asks the inventor what he thinks of other people.
Charles Kettering
#63. My dad was an inventor, and I think I've always had a rosy view of technology, or at least its potential.
Scott McCloud
#64. An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he's in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots.
Charles Kettering
#65. Apparently, the glasses didn't need to be connected to the internet for the wearer to poke into someone's personal life. Even though a search engine could lead to an individual's address, the browser couldn't actually physically take you there. What had this inventor done? Did he have any idea?
Chess Desalls
#66. A South Korean inventor has finally created the robot that mankind has been waiting for. Scientists who have been worried about the robot apocalypse can finally set aside their fears thanks to the new robot Drinky, machines are no longer going to enslave us. They're going to puke on our shoes.
Mike Pesca
#68. Man is/the symbol-using (symbol making, symbol-misusing) animal/inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative)/separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making/goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order)/and rotten with perfection.
Kenneth Burke
#69. I was terrible at maths, but I could grasp science, and I used to love to read about the lives of the scientists. I wanted to be a scientist or an inventor.
Francis Ford Coppola
#70. The hamster-powered hat is the same as any other hat. It keeps your head warm and looks smart," the inventor said. "The hamster generates heat by running on the wheel. If you get a big enough hamster, it will keep your whole face warm.
Mark Jackman
#71. Man is much more the victim of his psychic constitution than its inventor.
C. G. Jung
#72. Few have heard of Fra Luca Pacioli, the inventor of double-entry bookkeeping; but he has probably had much more influence on human life than has Dante or Michelangelo.
Herbert J. Muller
#73. Th'invention all admir'd, and each, how he to be th'inventor miss'd; so easy it seem'd once found, which yet unfound most would have thought impossible.
John Milton
#74. When the inventor of the drawing board messed things up, what did he go back to?
Bob Monkhouse
#75. Architect of quantum theories, brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project, inventor of the ubiquitous Feynman diagram, ebullient bongo player and storyteller, Richard Phillips Feynman was the most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times.
James Gleick
#77. The inventor is a man who looks around upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world; he is haunted by an idea. The spirit of invention possesses him, seeking materialization.
Alexander Graham Bell
#78. When I was 22, I realised I wanted to be an inventor.
Nick Woodman
#79. Spanx are amazing. Thank you to the inventor of that.
Vanessa Lachey
#80. Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#81. The French inventor told the acting troupe about Lord Maccon's death.
Gail Carriger
#82. Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance!
George Eliot
#83. The inventor ... looks upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world; he is haunted by an idea.
Alexander Graham Bell
#84. I'm an inventor. I don't enjoy running the business.
Woody Norris
#85. My father was a watchmaker and an inventor. I saw him working in the house every day. The work ethic, I got from him. He worked hard and he never complained about it.
Carl Reiner
#86. I maintain that many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practice the dull craft of experimental psychology.
Oswald Spengler
#87. We are in the position of the man who has only two ambitions in life. One is to invent the universal solvent which will dissolve any solid substance, and the second is to invent the universal container which will hold any liquid. Whatever this inventor does, he will be frustrated.
Norbert Wiener
#88. His problem was the eternal question: What should he be? Inventor, scientist, artist - the energy he felt surging through him, an energy far more than physical and yet pervading the restlessness of his body, was a burden to him until he could find the path for its release.
Pearl S. Buck
#89. Every idea is in the soul of its owner. No other power can shift it to another soul, that is why we have the telephone, aircraft, etc, each having its unique inventor.
Michael Bassey Johnson
#90. With the aid of these active experimental sciences man becomes an inventor of phenomena, a real foreman of creation; and under this head we cannot set limits to the power that he may gain over nature through future progress of the experimental sciences.
Claude Bernard
#91. There is the sheer amount of Franklin's wisdom. And the talent. Franklin played four instruments. He was the nation's leading scientist and inventor, plus a leading author, statesman, and philanthropist. There has never been anyone like him.
Charlie Munger
#92. Every day some scientist discovered a new species of frog or waterlily, and that, too, seemed to confirm some divine showman, some celestial inventor putting new toys before us, hidden but hidden poorly, just where we might happen upon them.
Dave Eggers
#93. Cheesecake. Are you shitting me? Who invented that? Probably Jesus of Nazareth. Or maybe Louis Pasteur. It makes me physically sick to think that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, yet the name of the inventor of cheesecake isn't tattooed on Dick Cheney's face.
Rob Delaney
#94. Many are ready, when listening to the inventor, to belittle and deny his achievements so that he will no longer be heard in honourable places, but after some months or a year, they use the inventor's words in speech or writing or design.
Filippo Brunelleschi
#95. When somebody builds me a time machine, I'm taking a trip back in time to find the inventor of the necktie and strangle him with one.
Marc Rainer
#96. I've been an amature inventor for a long time.
Billy Sheehan
#97. I guess that's just the life of an inventor: what people do with your ideas takes you totally by surprise.
Stephanie Kwolek
#98. Whether you're a writer of stories or a writer of patents, you're an inventor.
Linda A. Tancs
#99. Interestingly enough after diving to 235 feet in Saba, I visited the Virgin Islands. There, as a pure Karmic coincidence, I met the inventor of the snowboard, Steve Sanders, Mr. Burton's brother.
Frederick Lenz
#100. I'm an inventor. I became interested in long-term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started.
Ray Kurzweil
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
