Invention Quotes

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! ~ Sam Hughes

Philosophy is the invention of the rich. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

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. ~ Michel Foucault

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. ~ Mark Forsyth

History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions. ~ Voltaire

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. ~ Edward Abbey

Fairy tales only happen in movies.
-George Melies
from The Invention of Hugo Cabret ~ Brian Selznick

We cannot fight the devil because fight is his invention. ~ Mihail Militaru

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. ~ Albert Schweitzer

An invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started. ~ Tim O'Reilly

I believe food is the most brilliant invention ever. ~ Helena Christensen

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? ~ Steve Toltz

I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete. ~ Steve Jobs

The reason why nothing happens is because nothing was done. Something will happen when something is done. Leaders take actions! ~ Israelmore Ayivor

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. ~ Ahmed Zaki Yamani

Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven. ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

Novelists invent characters; poets invent themselves. ~ Marty Rubin

Humans are ideas; and ideas are uniquely human. ~ A.E. Samaan

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time. ~ John Berger

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. ~ Jack Welch

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. ~ George Lucas

Necessity starves on the stoop of invention. ~ Theodore Roethke

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 ~ Nils Aslak Valkeapaa

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. ~ David Elkind

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. ~ Robert Moog

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. ~ Cory Doctorow

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

Music, drawing, books, invention & exercise will be so many resources to you against ennui. ~ Thomas Jefferson

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Michael Specter

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. ~ Cate Blanchett

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. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. ~ Mary Shelley

Art is beauty, the perpetual invention of detail, the choice of words, the exquisite care of execution. ~ Theophile Gautier

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

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. ~ Ramana Maharshi

Interest is the invention of Satan. ~ Thomas A. Edison

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. ~ Meghan Trainor

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? ~ Lady Gaga

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

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. ~ Christian Louboutin

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. ~ Pam Houston

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

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 ~ Aldo Leopold

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

Every invention comes through anxiousness. ~ Rakesh Wadhwani

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. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

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

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. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

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. ~ Margery Allingham

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. ~ Thomas A. Edison

No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination. ~ Edward Hopper

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. ~ Ernst Junger

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? ~ Ivan Doig

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. ~ Orhan Pamuk

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. ~ Joline Godfrey

I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men. ~ Nikola Tesla

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 ~ Kim Wright

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. ~ Edward Kennedy

God forgives those who invent what they need. ~ Lillian Hellman

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

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. ~ Robert Coover

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

Logic is a wonderful invention. It is so wonderful, people often mistake it for reason. Reason, however, requires sense. Logic requires only consistency. ~ Jane Haddam

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. ~ Jonathan Swift

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. ~ Pinchas Lapide

Getting caught is the mother of invention. ~ Robert Byrne

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. ~ John Ruskin

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. ~ Margarita Engle

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. ~ Sylvia Mathews Burwell

I checked out the wine. Screw cap. The greatest invention since fire. ~ Janet Evanovich

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

Peanut butter is the greatest invention since Christianity, ~ Diana Vreeland

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. ~ Dean Koontz

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! ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

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. ~ Leah Raeder

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. ~ S.R. Gibbs

The case of the inventor who is duped by his own invention emphasizes our need for circumspection. ~ Adolfo Bioy Casares

Our ability to create has outreached our ability to use wisely the products of our invention. ~ Whitney M. Young

Utterly ingenious! Tiffany Trent has more fine invention at her fingertips than a roomful of magical Leonardos! ~ Ellen Kushner

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

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. ~ Philip Yancey

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. ~ Lewis B. Smedes

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. ~ Steven Weinberg

We should think about whether canonizations, which are an invention of the Middle Ages, still make sense today. ~ Hans Kung

I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry. ~ Norman MacCaig

Pfft. Wine is the greatest invention. Next to the vibrator, of course. They're equally fabulous. ~ Emma Hart

Necessity is the mother of invention but boredom is the mother of doing bafflingly stupid shit. ~ Jenny Lawson

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

Poverty is the mother of invention ~ Sunday Adelaja

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. ~ John M. Tyler

The ball is man's most disastrous invention, not excluding the wheel. ~ Robert Morley

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

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. ~ William Henry Hudson

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. ~ Vincent McNabb

...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. ~ A.O. Scott

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 ~ Ivan Illich

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. ~ Robert Moor

Boredom is a lack of crazy. Its a lack of creativity. Invention. Innovation. If you're bored, blame yourself. ~ Katelyn S. Bolds

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. ~ Robert Bryndza