Top 53 Science Invention Quotes
#1. Invention is not always good. Sometimes our inventions are too powerful for us to control.
Gemma Malley
#2. Invention breeds invention. No sooner is the electric telegraph devised than gutta-percha, the very material it requires, is found. The aeronaut is provided with gun-cotton, the very fuel he wants for his balloon.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#3. The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.
Nikola Tesla
#4. It has today occurred to me that an amplifier using semiconductors rather than vacuum is in principle possible.
[Laboratory notebook, 29 Dec 1939.]
William Shockley
#5. We must give as much weight to the arousal of the emotions and to the expression of moral and aesthetic values as we now give to science, to invention, to practical organization. One without the other is impotent.
Lewis Mumford
#6. Great triumphs of engineering genius - the locomotive, the truss bridge, the steel rail - ... are rather invention than engineering proper.
Arthur Mellen Wellington
#7. For one person who is blessed with the power of invention, many will always be found who have the capacity of applying principles.
Charles Babbage
#8. In my view, ideas and other intellectual productions are more interesting, more indicative of intelligence, and more productively debated than IQ alone.
Christopher Langan
#9. Mr Edison gave America just what was needed at that moment in history. They say that when people think of me, they think of my assembly line. Mr. Edison, you built an assembly line which brought together the genius of invention, science and industry.
Henry Ford
#10. The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA.
Lewis Thomas
#11. Science is to find something unknown, while invention is to make something new out of the known theory.
Ivar Giaever
#12. Moreover, the works already known are due to chance and experiment rather than to sciences; for the sciences we now possess are merely systems for the nice ordering and setting forth of things already invented; not methods of invention or directions for new works.
Francis Bacon
#13. Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.
George Bernard Shaw
#14. This theory [the oxygen theory] is not as I have heard it described, that of the French chemists, it is mine (elle est la mienne); it is a property which I claim from my contemporaries and from posterity.
Antoine Lavoisier
#15. Astronomy is not the apex of science or of invention. But it is a test of the cast of temperament and mind that underlies a culture.
Jacob Bronowski
#16. A nation has a fixed quantity of invention, and it will make itself felt.
Benjamin Disraeli
#17. He wrested the world's whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch.
Dava Sobel
#18. As the prerogative of Natural Science is to cultivate a taste for observation, so that of Mathematics is, almost from the starting point, to stimulate the faculty of invention.
James Joseph Sylvester
#19. ...Maude Harris told me that all was well with the world because medical science had profited by the war. That is an epitome of civilization. We continually invent new diseases and almost catch up with them by our invention of remedies.
Joe Gould
#20. Francis Galton, whose mission it seems to be to ride other men's hobbies to death, has invented the felicitous expression 'structureless germs'.
James Clerk Maxwell
#21. Descartes constructed as noble a road of science, from the point at which he found geometry to that to which he carried it, as Newton himself did after him ... He carried this spirit of geometry and invention into optics, which under him became a completely new art.
Voltaire
#22. There is no difference between science and art when it comes to creativeness, productiveness, to come to conclusions and to formulations.
Josef Albers
#23. Photography, as an invention, was both art and science. The view it gave us of the world was in some measure acceptable because it was a product of our vision of the world; and it did so as part of the same process which seemed to impart 'truth': science.
Joseph Kosuth
#24. Science fiction readers probably have the gene for novelty, and seem to enjoy a cascade of invention as much as a writer enjoys providing one.
Walter Jon Williams
#25. But how to raise a sum in the different States has been my greatest difficulty.
Robert Fulton
#26. Science is to be much commended for the ingenuity, the patience, and the persistency it displays in the invention of instruments wherewith to ferret out the secrets of nature.
Max Heindel
#27. Thus science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths; neither with the collection of observations, nor with the invention of experiments, but with the critical discussion of myths, and of magical techniques and practices.
Karl Popper
#28. [Science fiction is] a specialized type of fantasy, in which the prime assumption usually is a new scientific discovery or invention.
Jack Williamson
#29. 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
#30. Mr. Watson - Come here - I want to see you.
[First intelligible words spoken over the telephone]
Alexander Graham Bell
#31. 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
#32. The divergent series are the invention of the devil, and it is a shame to base on them any demonstration whatsoever. By using them, one may draw any conclusion he pleases and that is why these series have produced so many fallacies and so many paradoxes.
Niels Henrik Abel
#33. Faith is a fine invention
When gentlemen can see,
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency.
Emily Dickinson
#34. Funny story. A bunch of people -- the cult -- blame the appearance of abilities on the invention of the internet.
Alex Lane
#35. We think of science as discovery, art as invention, but is there a "third world" of mathematics, which is somehow, mysteriously, both?
Oliver Sacks
#36. [An engineer's] invention causes things to come into existence from ideas, makes world conform to thought; whereas science, by deriving ideas from observation, makes thought conform to existence.
Carl Mitcham
#37. [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
#38. The inventors of tools enhance civilization,
but the author of ideas enables them to invent.
Toba Beta
#39. That was a stupid idea I made up while drunk. Why did someone build that?
Warren Ellis
#40. 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
#41. Andrade [who was looking after wartime inventions] is like an inverted Micawber, waiting for something to turn down.
Henry Tizard
#42. To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
Thomas A. Edison
#43. The Book of the science of Mechanics must precede the Book of useful inventions.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#45. It has occurred to me more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.
Frank Herbert
#46. Science burrows its insulted head in the filth of slaughterous inventions.
Winston Churchill
#47. I look forward to the invention of faster-than-light travel. What I'm not looking forward to is the long wait in the dark once I arrive at my destination.
Marc Beland
#48. Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Nikola Tesla
#49. It is childish to assume that science began in Greece; the Greek "miracle" was prepared by millenia of work in Egypt, Mesopotamia and possibly in other regions. Greek science was less an invention than a revival.
George Sarton
#50. 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
#51. In Zen Buddhism, "The Great Cessation" is a term that points to the abandoning of the effort to define one's self by any outer definition and to give up acts of futility. It is to let the world remain a mystery that cannot be captured by science, language, or any invention of the mind
Mike Scheidt
#52. If words were invented to conceal thought, newspapers are a great improvement of a bad invention
Henry David Thoreau
#53. It is a fraud of the Christian system to call the sciences human invention; it is only the application of them that is human.
Thomas Paine
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