Invention Quotes

#1. The aeroplane is an invention of the devil and will never play any part in such a serious business as the defence of the nation, my boy! - Author: Sam Hughes

#2. Philosophy is the invention of the rich. - Author: Vladimir Nabokov

#3. It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form. - Author: Michel Foucault

#4. The beauty of merism is that it's absolutely unnecessary. It's words for words' sake: a gushing torrent of invention filled with noun and noun and signifying nothing. Why a rhetorical figure that gabs on and on for no good reason should be central to the rite of marriage is beyond me. - Author: Mark Forsyth

#5. History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions. - Author: Voltaire

#6. The real work of men was hunting meat. The invention of agriculture was a giant step in the wrong direction, leading to serfdom, cities, and empire. From a race of hunters, artists, warriors, and tamers of horses, we degraded ourselves to what we are now: clerks, functionaries, laborers, entertainers, processors of information. - Author: Edward Abbey

#7. Fairy tales only happen in movies.
-George Melies
from The Invention of Hugo Cabret - Author: Brian Selznick

#8. We cannot fight the devil because fight is his invention. - Author: Mihail Militaru

#9. The quiet conscience is the invention of the devil. No one of us may permit any preventable pain to be inflicted even though the responsibility for that pain is not ours. No one may shut his eyes and think that the pain which is therefore not visible, is non-existent. - Author: Albert Schweitzer

#10. An invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started. - Author: Tim O'Reilly

#11. I believe food is the most brilliant invention ever. - Author: Helena Christensen

#12. I've been labelled many times - a criminal, an anarchist, a rebel, sometimes human garbage, but never a philosopher, which is a pity because that's what I am. I chose a life apart from the common flow, not only because the common flow makes me sick but because I question the logic of the flow, and not only that - I don't know if the flow exists! Why should I chain myself to the wheel when the wheel itself might be a construct, an invention, a common dream to enslave us? - Author: Steve Toltz

#13. I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete. - Author: Steve Jobs

#14. The reason why nothing happens is because nothing was done. Something will happen when something is done. Leaders take actions! - Author: Israelmore Ayivor

#15. Every day we hear about a new invention here and there and they are reducing considerably their consumption of oil. But the day they use hydrogen for transportation, this is the day that oil disappears. - Author: Ahmed Zaki Yamani

#16. Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven. - Author: Georg C. Lichtenberg

#17. Novelists invent characters; poets invent themselves. - Author: Marty Rubin

#18. Humans are ideas; and ideas are uniquely human. - Author: A.E. Samaan

#19. What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time. - Author: John Berger

#20. Innovation is not a big breakthrough invention every time. Innovation is a constant thing. But if you don't have an innovative company [team], coming to work everyday to find a better way, you don't have a company[team]. You're getting ready to die on the vine. You're always looking for the next innovation, the next niche, the next product improvement, the next service improvement. But always trying to get better. - Author: Jack Welch

#21. I think crossing into the digital age is the big move for the industry. I think it will be the biggest thing that's happened while I've been making movies. I equate it to the invention of color or sound, and I don't see any other major technical process coming along and changing that. - Author: George Lucas

#22. Necessity starves on the stoop of invention. - Author: Theodore Roethke

#23. It is already long ago
so long ago

How do I know
that you are not
an illusion of the senses
an invention of though - Author: Nils Aslak Valkeapaa

#24. The idea of childhood as a social invention, in retrospect, is hardly credible. In the Bible, in writings of the Greeks and Romans, and in the works of the first great educator of the modern era, Comenius, children were recognized as being both different from adults and different from one another with respect to their stages of development. To be sure, the scientific study of children and the increased length of life in modern times have enhanced our understanding of age differences, but they have always been acknowledged. - Author: David Elkind

#25. I happen to think that computers are the most important thing to happen to musicians since the invention of cat-gut which was a long time ago. - Author: Robert Moog

#26. Real invention is a process of repeated, crushing failure that leads, very rarely, to a success. If you want to succeed faster, there's nothing for it but to fail faster and better. - Author: Cory Doctorow

#27. As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. - Author: Michel Foucault

#28. Music, drawing, books, invention & exercise will be so many resources to you against ennui. - Author: Thomas Jefferson

#29. I don't think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you're willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn't work. If you're going to invent, it means you're going to experiment, and if you're going to experiment, you're going to fail, and if you're going to fail, you have to think long term. - Author: Jeff Bezos

#30. It is only two hundred years ago that we had the invention of industrial agriculture. What did that revolution do to us? It brought us power. And freedom from a life spent kneeling in sodden rice paddies or struggling fourteen hours a day to collect cotton bolls or snap peas. Freedom, in short, from an existence governed by agony, injury, and pain - one that most farmers, and most humans, have always had to endure. - Author: Michael Specter

#31. O matter how much research you do, or invention you do, whether it's a character from a novel, a completely invented character or someone who actually existed, it's a work of faction. By the very fact you only have an hour and a half or two hours to tell a story, you're telescoping events and it is, in the end, a work of imagination. - Author: Cate Blanchett

#32. We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are. - Author: Henry David Thoreau

#33. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. - Author: Mary Shelley

#34. Art is beauty, the perpetual invention of detail, the choice of words, the exquisite care of execution. - Author: Theophile Gautier

#35. 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. - Author: Richard J. Borden

#36. People such as inventors searching for new material, make their discoveries in a state of self-forgetfulness. It is in a condition of deep intellectual concentration that this forgetfulness of the ego arises and the invention is revealed. This is also a way of developing intuition. - Author: Ramana Maharshi

#37. Interest is the invention of Satan. - Author: Thomas A. Edison

#38. I don't read books. I read 'On the Road' in high school, and that was awesome, so I guess that's my favorite book. 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' even though I didn't read it, that's the greatest story. SparkNotes came in when I was in high school, and that was the greatest invention. - Author: Meghan Trainor

#39. There's this idea that it's all natural, but everything's been staged to look natural. It is also an invention. It's just that my inventions are different. I often get asked about my artifice, but isn't fashion based on the idea that we can create a fantasy? - Author: Lady Gaga

#40. History is a constant race between invention and catastrophe. Education helps but it's never enough. You also must run. - Author: Frank Herbert

#41. I hate the idea of natural. For example, I prefer gardens to wild nature. I like to see the human touch. High heels are a complete invention - an extravagance. They're far from natural, but it's the impracticality that I adore. I prefer the useless to the useful, the sophisticated to the natural. - Author: Christian Louboutin

#42. The more important question, of course, was what the new Lucy would do, and even though I was pretty sure the old Lucy wouldn't be around much anymore, I was a little bit afraid the new Lucy hadn't yet shown up. - Author: Pam Houston

#43. 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? - Author: T. S. Eliot

#44. What is a hobby anyway? Where is the line of demarcation between hobbies and ordinary normal pursuits? I have been unable to answer this question to my own satisfaction. At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant. Certainly many of our most satisfying avocations today consist of making something by hand which machines can usually make more quickly and cheaply, and sometimes better. Nevertheless I must in fairness admit that in a different age the mere fashioning of a machine might have been an excellent hobby... Today the invention of a new machine, however noteworthy to industry, would, as a hobby, be trite stuff. Perhaps we have here the real inwardness of our own question: A hobby is a defiance of the contemporary. It is an assertion of those permanent values which the momentary eddies of social evolution have contravened or overlooked. If this is true, then we may also say that every hobbyist is inherently a radical, and that his tribe is inherently a minority.

This, however, is serious: Becoming serious is a grievous fault in hobbyists. It is an axiom that no hobby should either seek or need rational justification. To wish to do it is reason enough. To find reasons why it is useful or beneficial converts it at once from an avocation into an industry–lowers it at once to the ignominious category of an 'exercise' undertaken for health, power, or profit. Lifting dumbbel - Author: Aldo Leopold

#45. 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. - Author: Daniel J. Siegel

#46. Every invention comes through anxiousness. - Author: Rakesh Wadhwani

#47. That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way. - Author: Ernest Hemingway,

#48. I'm not the marrying kind -"
St. Vincent snorted. "No man is. Marriage is a female invention. - Author: Lisa Kleypas

#49. Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllables) on a page - rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and "guesses" at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words - just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us to simply improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we will still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its "inventors." All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are - accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows. - Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

#50. When Mr. William Faraday sat down to write his memoirs after fifty-eight years of blameless inactivity he found the work of inscribing the history of his life almost as tedious as living it had been, and so, possessing a natural invention coupled with a gift for locating the easier path, he began to prevaricate a little upon the second page, working his way up to downright lying on the sixth and subsequent folios. - Author: Margery Allingham

#51. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to insure the National Wealth, must go in debt and submit to ruinous interest charges, at the hands of men, who control the fictitious value of gold. Interest is the invention of Satan. - Author: Thomas A. Edison

#52. No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination. - Author: Edward Hopper

#53. These inventions became, incidentally, increasingly revolting to me, for I was ineradicably marked by a touch of the old cavalryman's primitive evaluation. I admit that in the earliest times the horseman had a considerable advantage over the foot soldier. (On the other hand considerably higher expenses were involved.) But the advantage was balanced by the invention of gunpowder, so rightly lamented by Ariosto. It was the end of glorious armies like those led by Charles the Bold. Cavalry charges still took place of course – and I cannot consider it unfair for the infantryman to load and fire two or three times before he received his comeuppance – but after that, death came to the cavalry.

The old Centaurs were overpowered by the new Titan. I had seen my own conqueror at close hand when I lay bleeding on the grass. He had unhorsed me – a sickly fellow, a pimply lad from the suburbs, some cutler from Sheffield or weaver from Manchester. He cowered behind his rubble heap, one eye shut, the other aiming at me across the machine gun, which did the damage. In a pattern of red and gray, he wove an evil cloth. This was the new Polyphemus or, rather, one of his lowest messenger boys with a wire mask before his one-eyed face. This was how the present masters looked. The beauty of the forests was past. - Author: Ernst Junger

#54. What is Imagination but mental mischief of a kind, and why can't the youngster protectively occupy himself with invention of that sort before maturity works him over? - Author: Ivan Doig

#55. To appropriate an invention, be it artistic or technical, you have to have at least a part of your spirit embracing it so radically that you somehow change. - Author: Orhan Pamuk

#56. All work and no play doesn't just make Jill and Jack dull, it kills the potential of discovery, mastery, and openness to change and flexibility and it hinders innovation and invention. - Author: Joline Godfrey

#57. I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men. - Author: Nikola Tesla

#58. Men deprived of female company quickly became fearsome creatures, and Trevor believed you could argue that civilization was in fact the invention of women, or at least the invention of the men who wanted to please them. If it were not for the ladies, Trevor often proclaimed, especially after a few beers, humanity would doubtlessly still be roaming the forests in animal skins. But - Author: Kim Wright

#59. Earlier this week ... scientists announced the completion of a task that once seemed unimaginable; and that is, the deciphering of the entire DNA sequence of the human genetic code. This amazing accomplishment is likely to affect the 21st century as profoundly as the invention of the computer or the splitting of the atom affected the 20th century. I believe that the 21st century will be the century of life sciences, and nothing makes that point more clearly than this momentous discovery. It will revolutionize medicine as we know it today. - Author: Edward Kennedy

#60. God forgives those who invent what they need. - Author: Lillian Hellman

#61. Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing. - Author: Dwight D. Eisenhower

#62. Strange, the impact of History, the grip it had on us, yet it was nothing but words. Accidental accretions for the most part, leaving most of the story out. We have not yet begun to explore the true power of the Word, I thought. What if we broke all the rules, played games with the evidence, manipulated language itself, made History a partisan ally? Of course, the Phantom was already onto this, wasn't he? Ahead of us again. What were his dialectical machinations if not the dissolution of the natural limits of language, the conscious invention of a space, a spooky artificial no-man's land, between logical alternatives. I loved to debate both sides of any issue, but thinking about that strange space in between made me sweat. Paradox was one thing I hated more than psychiatrists and lady journalists. - Author: Robert Coover

#63. The muse of invention handed me a rifle and I shot a white bear who sat down and said: Ah. - Author: Vladimir Nabokov

#64. Logic is a wonderful invention. It is so wonderful, people often mistake it for reason. Reason, however, requires sense. Logic requires only consistency. - Author: Jane Haddam

#65. Neither is it safe to count upon the weakness of any man's understanding, who is thoroughly possessed of the spirit of revenge to sharpen his invention. - Author: Jonathan Swift

#66. I accept the resurrection of Easter Sunday not as an invention of the community of disciples, but as a historical event. If the resurrection of Jesus from the dead on that Easter Sunday were a public event which had been made known ... not only to the 530 Jewish witnesses but to the entire population, all Jews would have become followers of Jesus. - Author: Pinchas Lapide

#67. Getting caught is the mother of invention. - Author: Robert Byrne

#68. We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men. - Author: John Ruskin

#69. What more do I need?
I don't know how my book
will end.
All I know is that love
is not the modern invention
of rebellious young girls.
Love is ancient.
A legend.
The truth. - Author: Margarita Engle

#70. No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet. But it did not go far enough. It only reached one-third of the world. - Author: Sylvia Mathews Burwell

#71. I checked out the wine. Screw cap. The greatest invention since fire. - Author: Janet Evanovich

#72. I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. - Author: Mary Shelley

#73. Peanut butter is the greatest invention since Christianity, - Author: Diana Vreeland

#74. On Christmas Eve, my mother and I and Teddy and Anita went to Mass together. The shadowy church was lit only by an overhead light trained on the altar and by the flames of hundreds of flickering candles in glass cups set all around the nave. If you squinted, the columns and vaults seemed to melt away, all the grandness of the architecture receded, and the space became intimate, almost as if you were cast back many centuries to a humble place where a miracle had occurred, where the radiance issued not from candles but from the air itself, back to a less hectic era before the invention of clocks, to a night of peace from which a renewed world would then begin to date itself. - Author: Dean Koontz

#75. Middle-earth is ... not my own invention. It is a modernization or alteration ... of an old word for the inhabited world of Men, the oikoumene: middle because thought of vaguely as set amidst the encircling Seas and (in the northern-imagination) between ice of the North and the fire of the South. O. English middan-geard, mediaeval E. midden-erd, middle-erd. Many reviewers seem to assume that Middle-earth is another planet! - Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

#76. The first thing he taught me was how to make love.
Before you laugh, know that I'd always hated that phrase. It sounded so corny, so old. Hippies made love. People my mom's age, though I preferred to believe I was an immaculate conception.
People my age hooked up, fucked, had sex. We didn't attach frilly ideas of oneness and eternity to a basic biological act. Most of us were from single-parent homes. Those who weren't wished they were when their parents screamed and beat the shit out of each other. We grew up sexualized, from toddler beauty pageants to the constant reminder that adults were waiting to lure us into vans with candy. The invention of MMS gave us a platform for the distribution of amateur porn.
That's a lot of conditioning to break through. - Author: Leah Raeder

#77. Clearing his throat "It is very improper for a lady to open the door, to a person of the opposite sex in her… sleeping attire."
"Improper? I look like I am wearing a rug," I exclaimed, as I motioned at the calf-length thick red fabric; that I was wearing with wide shoulder straps. "Secondly, I don't see you as human, let alone a man. You are more like a homicidal invention, of my hormonal teenage nightmare; which I can't seem to be able to awake from. - Author: S.R. Gibbs

#78. The case of the inventor who is duped by his own invention emphasizes our need for circumspection. - Author: Adolfo Bioy Casares

#79. Our ability to create has outreached our ability to use wisely the products of our invention. - Author: Whitney M. Young

#80. Utterly ingenious! Tiffany Trent has more fine invention at her fingertips than a roomful of magical Leonardos! - Author: Ellen Kushner

#81. 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. - Author: Sven Beckert

#82. Evil's greatest triumph may be its success in portraying religion as an enemy of pleasure when, in fact, religion accounts for its source: every good and enjoyable thing is the invention of a Creator who lavished gifts on the world. - Author: Philip Yancey

#83. Forgiveness is God's invention for coming to terms with a world in which people are unfair to each other and hurt each other deeply. He began by forgiving us. And He invites us all to forgive each other. - Author: Lewis B. Smedes

#84. I chose "Discovery" instead of "Invention" to suggest that science is the way it is not so much because of various adventitious historic acts of invention, but because of the way nature is. With all its imperfections, modern science is a technique that is sufficiently well tuned to nature so that it works - it is a practice that allows us to learn reliable things about the world. In this sense, it is a technique that was waiting for people to discover it. - Author: Steven Weinberg

#85. We should think about whether canonizations, which are an invention of the Middle Ages, still make sense today. - Author: Hans Kung

#86. I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry. - Author: Norman MacCaig

#87. Pfft. Wine is the greatest invention. Next to the vibrator, of course. They're equally fabulous. - Author: Emma Hart

#88. Necessity is the mother of invention but boredom is the mother of doing bafflingly stupid shit. - Author: Jenny Lawson

#89. 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. - Author: Marc Beland

#90. Poverty is the mother of invention - Author: Sunday Adelaja

#91. The cell was the first invention of the animal kingdom, and all higher animals are and must be cellular in structure. Our tissues were formed ages on ages ago; they have all persisted. Most of our organs are as old as worms. All these are very old, older than the mountains. - Author: John M. Tyler

#92. The ball is man's most disastrous invention, not excluding the wheel. - Author: Robert Morley

#93. In living organisms, nucleic acid molecules are the only indefinite hereditary replicators, or at least they were until the invention of language and music. - Author: John Maynard Smith

#94. Bear in mind that the children of life are the children of joy; that the lower animals are only unhappy when made so by man; that man alone of all the creatures, has "found out many inventions", the chief of which appears to be the art of making himself miserable, and of seeing all Nature stained with that dark and hateful colour. - Author: William Henry Hudson

#95. Buy boots you can walk in. Walk in them. Even if you lessen the income of the General Omnibus Company, or your family doctor; you will discover the human foot. On discovering it, your joy will be as great as if you had invented it. But this joy is the greatest, because no human invention even of Mr. Ford or Mr. Marconi is within a mile of a foot. - Author: Vincent McNabb

#96. ...to be an American adult has always been to be a symbolic figure in someone else's coming-of-age story. And that's no way to live. It is a kind of moral death in a culture that claims youthful self-invention as the greatest value. We can now avoid this fate. The elevation of every individual's inarguable likes and dislikes over formal critical discourse, the unassailable ascendancy of the fan, has made children of us all. We have our favorite toys, books, movies, video games, songs, and we are as apt to turn to them for comfort as for challenge or enlightenment. - Author: A.O. Scott

#97. P3- every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permit the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty - Author: Ivan Illich

#98. Back home, Huxley drew from this experience to compose a series of audacious attacks against the Romantic love of wilderness. The worship of nature, he wrote, is "a modern, artificial, and somewhat precarious invention of refined minds." Byron and Wordsworth could only rhapsodize about their love of nature because the English countryside had already been "enslaved to man." In the tropics, he observed, where forests dripped with venom and vines, Romantic poets were notably absent. Tropical peoples knew something Englishmen didn't. "Nature," Huxley wrote, "is always alien and inhuman, and occasionally diabolic." And he meant always: Even in the gentle woods of Westermain, the Romantics were naive in assuming that the environment was humane, that it would not callously snuff out their lives with a bolt of lightning or a sudden cold snap. After three days amid the Tuckamore, I was inclined to agree. - Author: Robert Moor

#99. Boredom is a lack of crazy. Its a lack of creativity. Invention. Innovation. If you're bored, blame yourself. - Author: Katelyn S. Bolds

#100. TO: [email protected]
Oh god! Oh god! Oh shit! I have just sent the email I was meant to send to you, slagging off Meryl to Meryl by mistake. Damn this email invention. - Author: Robert Bryndza

#101. Men who expect universal peace through invention of destructive weapons of war are no wiser than one who, noting the improvement of agricultural implements, should prophesy an end to the tilling of the soil. - Author: Ambrose Bierce

#102. The more a person learns how to use the forces of nature for his own purposes, by means of perfecting the sciences and the invention and improvement of machines, the more he will produce. - Author: Friedrich List

#103. We should have more invention. - Author: Nathan Myhrvold

#104. I wondered whether music might not be the unique example of what might have been - if the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas had not intervened - the means of communication between souls. - Author: Marcel Proust

#105. Physical love only rarely merges with the soul's love. What does the soul actually do when the body unites (in that age-old, universal, immutable motion) with another body? What a wealth of invention it finds in those moments, thus reaffirming its superiority over the monotony of the corporeal life! How it scorns the body, and uses it (together with its partner) as a pretext for insane fantasies a thousand times more carnal than the two coupled bodies! Or conversely: how it belittles the body by leaving it to its pendular to-and-fro while the soul (already wearied by the caprices of the body) turns its thoughts entirely elsewhere: to a game of chess, to recollections of dinner, to a book... - Author: Milan Kundera

#106. That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been. - Author: Lascelles Abercrombie

#107. To acknowledge the need of a new world-view would undermine the whole of their activity, and not many thinkers were willing to pay that price. Particularly not in a society where social exclusion meant rapid transportation to the proudest invention of the humanist sciences: the mental hospital. - Author: Alexander Bard

#108. Painting does not come from intelligence so much, as from sight and feeling and invention. - Author: Philip Gilbert Hamerton

#109. Here is individual responsibility and the invention of conscience. You can if you will but it is up to you. This little story(from the Bible)turns out to be one of the most profound in the world. I always felt it was,but now I know it is.
- Author: John Steinbeck

#110. The difficult is what takes a little time. The impossible is what takes a little longer. - Author: Fridtjof Nansen

#111. A blank page of paper and a pen is the greatest invention its so exciting to be confronted by possibility. - Author: Nicky Wire

#112. Writing is more about discovery than invention. - Author: Diane Setterfield

#113. Necessity is the motherfucker of invention. - Author: Christopher Buckley

#114. Clocks were invented to warn us. Tick (time is passing). Tock (time has passed). - Author: Kamand Kojouri

#115. All of the biggest technological inventions created by man - the airplane, the automobile, the computer - says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness. - Author: Mark Kennedy

#116. We tend to think of divorced or complicated families as a modern invention, and that is not at all true. You only have to read the Greek myths to see broken homes, widows, divorce, stepchildren, children trying to get along with new parents. - Author: Rick Riordan

#117. Think for a moment about the process that humans have used to record events throughout history. The first evidence we know of is paintings on cave walls. A little further along in time, after many intermediate steps, we see the development of writing. In the more recent past, we see the invention of the camera, audio recording devices, and ultimately video. The manner in which humans have recorded history (and to a lesser extent our own lives) has evolved. We've come a long way. Consider the implications of time. Much of the technology we take for granted today was pure science fiction 50-100 years ago, a dream 200 years ago, and inconceivable 500 years ago. Using these groupings of viewpoints, we can project into the future and categorize the possibilities. In - Author: Todd William

#118. Dogbert to Dilbert
"My invention can detect human stupidity. It has a very simple interface. All I do is point it at people."
"Then what does it do?"
"Why would it need to do anything else? - Author: Scott Adams

#119. Presley brought an excitement to singing, in part because rock and roll was greeted as his invention, but for other reasons not so widely reflected on: Elvis Presley had the most beautiful singing voice of any human being on earth. - Author: William F. Buckley, Jr.

#120. Why do I keep doing this? Making her out to be more than what she was, grander, omniscient even, lovely and unreal. She could be such a bitch. She could sense what you hated about yourself, and is you pissed her off she'd throw it back in your face, she'd make sure you knew she thought it, too. Sometimes I feel like she is my invention. Like the more I say, the further from the truth of her I get. I'm trying to hold palmfuls of sand, but I squeeze harder, tighten my fists, and the quicker it all escapes. - Author: Julie Buntin

#121. The mistake I had made, obviously, was in overestimating human intelligence. By and large, one can not deny certain of mankind's achievements, such as the invention of lamb chops and central heating, but many people are strangely unreceptive to nuance. The hint, the diplomatic nudge, the oblique statements
these very often pass straight over their heads, and man and dog find themselves looking at each other through a fog of incomprehension. Thus it was with the management and myself. Delightful and welcoming, they certainly were, but not, it seemed, too quick on the uptake. - Author: Peter Mayle

#122. The beautiful unruliness of literature is what makes it so much fun to wander through: you read Jane Austen and you say, oh, that is IT. And then you turn around and read Sterne, and you say, Man, that is IT. And then you wander across a century or so, and you run into Kafka, or Calvino, or Cortazar, and you say, well that is IT. And then you stroll through what Updike called the grottos of Ulysses, and after that you consort with Baldwin or Welty or Spencer, or Morrison, or Bellow or Fitzgerald and then back to W. Shakespeare, Esq; the champ, and all the time you feel the excitement of being in the presence of IT. And when you yourself spend the good time writing, you are not different in kind than any of these people, you are part of that miracle of human invention. So get to work. Get on with IT, no matter how difficult IT is. Every single gesture, every single stumble, every single uninspired-feeling hour, is worth IT. Richard Bausch - Author: Kathy Fish

#123. For many years Minos has been lucky to have in his court the most gifted inventor, the most skilled artificer outside of the Olympian forges of Hephaestus. His name is Daedalus and he is capable of fashioning moving objects out of metal, bronze, wood, ivory and gemstones. He has mastered the art of tightly coiling leaves of steel into powerful springs, which control wheels and chains to form intricate and marvellous mechanisms that mark the passage of the hours with great precision and accuracy, or control the levels of watercourses. There is nothing this cunning man cannot contrive in his workshop. There are moving statues there, men and women animated by his skill, boxes that play music and devices that can awaken him in the morning. Even if only half the stories of what Daedalus can achieve are true then you can be certain that no more cunning and clever an inventor, architect and craftsman has ever walked this earth. - Author: Stephen Fry

#124. The computer is my favourite invention. I feel lucky to be part of the global village. I don't mean to brag, but I'm so fast with technology. People think it all seems too much, but we'll get used to it. I'm sure it all seemed too much when we were learning to walk. - Author: Yoko Ono

#125. The golden hour of invention must terminate like other hours, and when the man of genius returns to the cares, the duties, the vexations, and the amusements of life, his companions behold him as one of themselves - the creature of habits and infirmities. - Author: Isaac D'Israeli

#126. People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are. - Author: W. Somerset Maugham

#127. Guilt is a Jewish invention improved upon by Christians for the last two thousand years. - Author: Rita Mae Brown

#128. 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 - Author: John F. Kennedy

#129. The calendar is a human invention; time does not exist on the spiritual level. - Author: Isabel Allende

#130. The half hour between waking and rising has all my life proved propitious to any task which was exercising my invention ... It was always when I first opened my eyes that the desired ideas thronged upon me. - Author: Walter Scott

#131. I love conversations!" "Why?" "Because we're all crazy!" said Serge. "And that's how society makes progress: imaginations getting together and glancing off each other in accidental tangents of invention. - Author: Tim Dorsey

#132. A glance through the Bible quickly dispels the rumor that sibling problems are an invention of the twenty-first century. - Author: Todd Cartmell

#133. Novels are nice,' my friend said. 'They stop.' He waggled his fingers to make quotation marks in the air. 'They say, 'The End.' Very nice. A marvelous invention. Here we have stories, but never 'The End. - Author: Philip Gourevitch

#134. I had made up my mind to find that for which I was searching even if it required the remainder of my life. After innumerable failures I finally uncovered the principle for which I was searching, and I was astounded at its simplicity. I was still more astounded to discover the principle I had revealed not only beneficial in the construction of a mechanical hearing aid but it served as well as means of sending the sound of the voice over a wire. Another discovery which came out of my investigation was the fact that when a man gives his order to produce a definite result and stands by that order it seems to have the effect of giving him what might be termed a second sight which enables him to see right through ordinary problems. What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it. - Author: Alexander Graham Bell

#135. A Greek invention, democracy is highly overrated. For starters, it never worked in Greece. The first philosophers were fascists and, even today, 2,500 years later, the "cradle of Western civilization" remains an incompetent state. Roman emperors and a vengeful, authoritarian God are the true European success stories. - Author: Thorsten J. Pattberg

#136. One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life. - Author: Henry Miller

#137. 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. - Author: Paul Rand

#138. That life sometimes imitates art is a mere Oscar Wilde-ish curiosity; that it should set about to do so in such unseemly haste that between notes and novel (not to mention between the drafted and the printed page) what had been fiction becomes idle fact, invention history--disconcerting! Especially to a fictionist who, like yours truly, had long since turned his professional back on literary realism in favour of the fabulous irreal, and only in this latest enterprise had projected, not without misgiving, a detente with the realistic tradition. It is as if Reality, a mistress too long ignored, must now settle scores with her errant lover. - Author: John Barth

#139. James Watt was equally distinguished as a natural philosopher and chemist; his inventions demonstrate his profound knowledge of those sciences, and that peculiar characteristic of genius - the union of them for practical application. - Author: Humphry Davy

#140. For Americans the contradiction between national ideal and social fact required explanation and correction. Ultimately this contradiction did not lead to the abandonment of the ideal of equal opportunity but rather to its postponement: to the notion of achieving for the next generation what could not be achieved for the current one. And the chief means to this end was a brilliant American invention: universal, free, compulsory public education. This "solution" was especially important for children and families because it gave children a central role in achieving the national ideal. - Author: Kenneth Keniston

#141. Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens. - Author: Nicholson Baker

#142. Modern electrical power distribution technology is largely the fruit of the labors of two men - Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. Compared with Edison, Tesla is relatively unknown, yet he invented the alternating electric current generation and distribution system that supplanted Edison's direct current technology and that is the system currently in use today. Tesla also had a vision of delivering electricity to the world that was revolutionary and unique. If his research had come to fruition, the technological landscape would be entirely different than it is today. Power lines and the insulated towers that carry them over thousands of country and city miles would not distract our view. Tesla believed that by using the electrical potential of the Earth, it would be possible to transmit electricity through the Earth and the atmosphere without using wires. With suitable receiving devices, the electricity could be used in remote parts of the planet. Along with the transmission of electricity, Tesla proposed a system of global communication, following an inspired realization that, to electricity, the Earth was nothing more than a small, round metal ball.
[...]
With $150,000 in financial support from J. Pierpont Morgan and other backers, Tesla built a radio transmission tower at Wardenclyffe, Long Island, that promised - along with other less widely popular benefits - to provide communication to people in the far corners of the world who needed no more than a handheld rece - Author: Christopher Dunn

#143. On historical you take the known facts, dramatize them, and then stitch them together by invention. It's a projective thing. - Author: William Monahan

#144. To defend my fear of sudden change, I chose to believe that life was incremental, that the tiny decisions you make every day determine your fate, that your job is to captain an enormous ship subtly into ever-clearer waters. But that's not how it works at all. Life occurs in moments. You get into college. You propose. You get the job. You get cancer. You get fired. She leaves you ... Because I was born in a stable country at a stable time, I falsely extrapolated that change is incremental. But if you zoom out just a little bit, you see that life is soccer, not basketball. It's revolution, invention, war. It's big bangs, exploding stars, asteroids killing the dinosaurs. Which means that all the action is in the risk taking, whether I want it to be or not. - Author: Joel Stein

#145. We all know that a lie needs no other grounds, than the invention of the liar; and to take for granted as truth, all that is alleged against the fame of others, is a species of credulity, that men would blush at on any other subject. - Author: Jane Porter

#146. We still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry and grasping at the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised to furnish new pretenses for revenue and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without a tribute. - Author: Thomas Paine

#147. WILDE: Oh - Bosie! (He weeps.) I have to go back to him, you know. Robbie will be furious but it can't be helped. The betrayal of one's friends is a bagatelle in the stakes of love, but the betrayal of oneself is a lifelong regret. Bosie is what became of me. He is spoiled, vindictive, utterly selfish and not very talented, but these are merely the facts. The truth is he was Hyacinth when Apollo loved him, he is ivory and gold, from his red rose-leaf lips comes music that fills me with joy, he is the only one who understands me. 'Even as a teething child throbs with ferment, so does the soul of him who gazes upon the boy's beauty; he can neither sleep at night nor keep still by day,' and a lot more besides, but before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself. Then we saw what we had made - the piece of ice in the fist you cannot hold or let go. (He weeps.) - Author: Tom Stoppard

#148. The first reaction is surely the most natural one, but not always the most correct one; thereupon, the invention of apologies. - Author: Criss Jami

#149. Sunglasses are best invention of this world
They hide eyes,which speak more then words - Author: Mohammed Zaki Ansari

#150. 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. - Author: Nikola Tesla

#151. One reproduces only that which is striking; that is to say, the necessary. Thus, one's recollections and inventions are liberated from the tyranny which nature exerts. - Author: Edgar Degas

#152. To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture; but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of the pin-maker; a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade), nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving, the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, - Author: Adam Smith

#153. Want is the mistress of invention - Author: Susanna Centlivre

#154. 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 - Author: Art Spiegelman

#155. My main purpose in life is to make enough money to create ever more inventions ... . The dove is my emblem ... . I want to save and advance human life, not destroy it ... . I am proud of the fact that I have never invented weapons to kill ... . - Author: Thomas A. Edison

#156. I like it when you reach into a vending machine to grab your candy bar, and that flap goes up to block you from reaching up? That's a good invention. Before that, it was hard times for the vending machine owners. "Yeah, what candy bar are you getting?" "That one, and every one on the bottom row!" - Author: Mitch Hedberg

#157. If we could create invention capitalism, that would be a helluva legacy, that would be a helluva thing to do ... We could actually turbocharge the rate at which the world invents things. - Author: Nathan Myhrvold

#158. And did not the degeneration of religion begin with reason itself? As Santayana says, the process of degeneration of religion was due to too much reasoning: "This religion unhappily long ago ceased to be wisdom expressed in fancy in order to become superstition overlaid with reasoning." The decay of religion is due to the pedantic spirit, in the invention of creeds, formulas, articles of faith, doctrines and apologies. We become increasingly less pious as we increasingly justify and rationalize our beliefs and become so sure that we are right. - Author: Lin Yutang

#159. It has today occurred to me that an amplifier using semiconductors rather than vacuum is in principle possible.
[Laboratory notebook, 29 Dec 1939.] - Author: William Shockley

#160. As we benefit from the inventions of others, we should be glad to share our own ... freely and gladly. - Author: Benjamin Franklin

#161. The sentence is the great invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn't ask for anything better. It's as near to godliness as I can get. - Author: John Banville

#162. Lysley Tenorio is a writer of sly wit and lively invention - these are stories bursting with wonders (from monster movies and leper colonies, to faith-healers and superheroes) - but most wondrous of all is his intimate sense of character. Each story is a confession of love betrayed, told with a mournful, austere tenderness as heartbreaking as it is breathtaking. - Author: Peter Ho Davies

#163. The ways of living have been rendered vastly easier by a multitude of inventions, by the increasing wealth of the country, by better and more intelligent service; and yet life is by no means easier, but indeed hard. The demands on time, whether real or imagined, have increased in a greater ratio than the supply of facilities for answering them, and as the earth provokingly continues to revolve on its axis just as rapidly as of old, the days are never long enough for all the duties which they bring. - Author: Anna Brackett

#164. All that is necessary, as it seems to me, to convince any reasonable person that the Bible is simply and purely of human invention - of barbarian invention - is to read it. Read it as you would any other book; think of it as you would of any other; get the bandage of reverence from your eyes; drive from your heart the phantom of fear; push from the throne of your brain the cowled form of superstition - then read the Holy Bible, and you will be amazed that you ever, for one moment, supposed a being of infinite wisdom, goodness and purity, to be the author of such ignorance and of such atrocity. - Author: Robert Green Ingersoll

#165. If one cannot invent a really convincing lie, it is often better to stick to the truth. - Author: Angela Thirkell

#166. I didn't fail 1000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1000 steps. - Author: Thomas A. Edison

#167. Yep, and your Internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there's no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don't think anything has changed, kid. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#168. The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt. - Author: Henry George

#169. The invention of fire-arms equalized the villein and the noble on the field of battle; printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes; - Author: Alexis De Tocqueville

#170. Evidently, I'd suffered an epiphany: the subconscious realization that when it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book. - Author: Tom Robbins

#171. Men are in fact, quite unable to control their own inventions; they at best develop adaptability to the new conditions those inventions create. - Author: John Galsworthy

#172. It's an invention I'm very proud of: the memorable-sex bonbon. - Author: Charlotte Roche

#173. 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. - Author: Cynthia Ozick

#174. John Locke invented common sense, and only Englishmen have had it ever since! - Author: Bertrand Russell

#175. Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers ... What we call art is a game. - Author: Octavio Paz

#176. Sleep was the greatest invention in the history of mankind. When I was sleeping, I wasn't feeling guilty, or miserable, or sad. - Author: Jenna Black

#177. When all is said and done, the invention of writing must be reckoned not only as a brilliant innovation but as a surpassing good for humanity. And assuming that we survive long enough to use their inventions wisely, I believe the same will be said of the modern Thoths and Prometheuses who are today devising
computers and programs at the edge of machine intelligence. - Author: Carl Sagan

#178. Instructors could teach the basic techniques and methods, but a mastery of mechanical knowledge could never make a person an artist. No one could teach creativity or invention. A spark needed to come from within. It must be something unique, something discovered by the individual, a leap of understanding, a burst of insight, the combining of common elements in an unexpected way. - Author: Michael J. Sullivan

#179. . . .they were assisted by the new technological invention of the telephone (that enemy of reflection, which became increasingly accepted as as means of communication) . . . - Author: Paul Gordon Lauren

#180. The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization. - Author: John Banville

#181. You have to explain the invention to customers - not once or twice but three or four times, with a different twist each time. - Author: Anonymous

#182. Money is a wonderful invention. It lets us save, it lets us specialize, right? I couldn't be a professor if there wasn't any money. Every day I would have to raise chicken and bread and broccoli and go ahead and spend all my time trading. So, money is a wonderful mechanism. - Author: Dan Ariely

#183. Science burrows its insulted head in the filth of slaughterous inventions. - Author: Winston Churchill

#184. I start where the last man left off. - Author: Thomas A. Edison

#185. Sometimes, the things They say, the laws They make, the way the world spins doesn't make any sense at all ...
Which is exactly why you have to ask "Why?" and keep on asking until you get the TRUTH ... - Author: Joe Kelly

#186. They have a certain gaiety to them, a power of invention, they don't care what people think. They have escaped, though what it is they've escaped from isn't clear to us. We think that their bizarre costumes, their verbal tics, are chosen, and that when the time comes we also will be free to choose. That's what I'm going to be like, - Author: Margaret Atwood

#187. Science is to find something unknown, while invention is to make something new out of the known theory. - Author: Ivar Giaever

#188. No inspiration comes from nowhere. No invention is based on nothing. You always need to be tuned up and be ready to start receiving the energy you look for. - Author: Nikolay Semyonov

#189. Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad , the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality. - Author: Simone Weil

#190. A hug from a child! he exclaims. Perhaps God's greatest invention! - Author: Adam Gidwitz

#191. Anthropological theory assumes that exposure in a treeless situation where all escape upwards was cut off led to the invention of myths. Kafka's ape, dragged into human society, expresses very similar ideas in his 'Report for an Academy'. It is the absence of any way of escape that has forced him to become human himself. - Author: W.G. Sebald

#192. The concept of war crimes is an American invention. - Author: George Wald

#193. As an artist she finds Dick's work hopelessly naive, yet she is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active. (Years later Chris would realise that her fondness for bad art is exactly like Jane Eyre's attraction to Rochester, a mean horse-faced junkie: bad characters invite invention. - Author: Chris Kraus

#194. Once . . . long ago, he'd thought of himself as an inventor of government. But the invention had fallen into old patterns. It was like some hideous contrivance with plastic memory. Shape it any way you wanted, but relax for a moment, and it snapped into the ancient forms. Forces at work beyond his reach in human breasts eluded and defied him. - Author: Frank Herbert

#195. Language is almost the most unique creation of humankind which defines itself; the alternative way of communication/comprehension/conception, yet overusing any invention, can cause Alienation. - Author: Fereidoon Yazdi

#196. When the truths are lying down with the knowledge of spiritualenlightenment. universe, cosmology, existence, darkmatter are beyond science innovation invention. -T∆NV€€ - Author: Tanveer Hossain Mullick

#197. For the great eras in the history of the development of all the arts have been eras not of increased feeling or enthusiasm in feeling for art, but of new technical improvements primarily and specially. The discovery of marble quarries in the purple ravines of Pentelicus and on the little low-lying hills of the island of Paros gave to the Greeks the opportunity for that intensified vitality of action, that more sensuous and simple humanism, to which the Egyptian sculptor working laboriously in the hard porphyry and rose-coloured granite of the desert could not attain. The splendour of the Venetian school began with the introduction of the new oil medium for painting. The progress in modern music has been due to the invention of new instruments entirely, and in no way to an increased consciousness on the part of the musician of any wider social aim. - Author: Oscar Wilde

#198. It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention. - Author: Lyndon B. Johnson

#199. It was a sombre snowy afternoon, and the gas-lamps were lit in the big reverberating station. As he paced the platform, waiting for the Washington express, he remembered that there were people who thought there would one day be a tunnel under the Hudson through which the trains of the Pennsylvania railway would run straight into New York. They were of the brotherhood of visionaries who likewise predicted the building of ships that would cross the Atlantic in five days, the invention of a flying machine, lighting by electricity, telephonic communication without wires, and other Arabian Nights marvels. - Author: Edith Wharton

#200. The treasury of America lies in those ambitions, those energies, that cannot be restricted to a special favored class. It depends upon the inventions of unknown men, upon the originations of unknown men, upon the ambitions of unknown men. Every country is renewed out of the ranks of the unknown, not out of the ranks of those already famous and powerful and in control. - Author: Woodrow Wilson