Inventions Quotes

1. "Olive Wellwood had the feeling writers often have when told perfect tales for fictions, that there was too much fact, too little space for the necessary insertion of inventions, which would here appear to be lies."
Author: A.S. Byatt

2. "And yet surely to alchemy this right is due, that it may be compared to the husbandman whereof Aesop makes the fable, that when he died he told his sons that he had left unto them gold buried under the ground in his vineyard: and they digged over the ground, gold they found none, but by reason of their stirring and digging the mould about the roots of their vines, they had a great vintage the year following: so assuredly the search and stir to make gold hath brought to light a great number of good and fruitful inventions and experiments, as well for the disclosing of nature as for the use of man's life."
Author: Aesop

3. "It is only men who are free, who create the inventions and intellectual works which to us moderns make life worth while."
Author: Albert Einstein

4. "I suppose that someday, suddenly, I will be transferred to another age, for example the chivalric or the bronze. The hope is, of course, that I arrive in period dress but not resemble a contemporary luminary, for I wish to simply onlook. But, more probably, thanks to chronologically garbled garb, or my mistakable face—which will lead to expectations of competence—I will have to explain my occurrence. That explained, I will have to explain my age, The Present, also known as "The Future" in the past. This is why I am studying our great inventions and advances: to be ready for questions."
Author: Amy Leach

5. "We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - romantic love and gunpowder."
Author: Andre Maurois

6. "I would say that, in the future, the book will be reserved for things that function best as a book. So, if I need a textbook that's going to be out of date because of new technological inventions, you're better off having it where you can download the supplements or the update."
Author: Art Spiegelman

7. "But no, music lasted longer than anything it inspired. After LPs, cassettes, and CDs, when matrimony was about to decay into its component elements—alimony and acrimony—the songs startled him and regained all their previous, pre-Rachel meanings, as if they had not only conjured her but then dismissed her, as if she had been entirely their illusion. He listened to the old songs again, years later on that same dark promenade, when every CD he had ever owned sat nestled in that greatest of all human inventions, the iPod, dialed up and yielding to his fingertip's tap. The songs now offered him, in exchange for all he had lost, the sensation that there was something still to long for, still, something still approaching, and all that had gone before was merely prologue to an unimaginably profound love yet to seize him. If there was any difference now, it was only that his hunger for music had become more urgent, less a daily pleasure than a daily craving."
Author: Arthur Phillips

8. "You make me laugh, with your metaphysical anguish, its just that you're scared silly, frightened of life, of men of action, of action itself, of lack of order. But everything is disorder, dear boy. Vegetable, mineral and animal, alldisorder, and so is the multitude of human races, the life of man, thought,history, wars, inventions, business and the arts, and all theories, passionsand systems. Its always been that way. Why are you trying to make something outof it? And what will you make? what are you looking for? There is no Truth.There's only action, action obeying a million different impulses, ephemeralaction, action subjected to every possible and imaginable contingency andcontradiction, Life. Life is crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, lies, disgust,stupidity, sickness, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, piles of corpses. what can you do about it, my poor friend?"
Author: Blaise Cendrars

9. "You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place."
Author: Bruce Sterling

10. "What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]"
Author: Carl Sagan

11. "Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic."
Author: Carl Sagan

12. "And the stories she'd been told, were they confessions of uncommitted crimes, accounts of the worst imaginable, imagined to keep fiction from becoming fact? The thought chased its own tail: these terrible stories still needed a first cause, a well-spring from which they leaped... Were these inventions common currency, as Purcell had claimed? Was there a place, however small, reserved in every heart for the monstrous?"
Author: Clive Barker

13. "How many 'inventions' are really memories, of the things we once knew?"
Author: Diana Gabaldon

14. "When women understand that governments and religions are human inventions; that Bibles, prayer-books, catechisms, and encyclical letters are all emanations from the brains of man, they will no longer be oppressed by the injunctions that come to them with the divine authority of *Thus sayeth the Lord.*"
Author: Elizabeth Cady Stanton

15. "The art of an artist must be his own art. It is... always a continuous chain of little inventions, little technical discoveries of one's own, in one's relation to the tool, the material and the colors."
Author: Emil Nolde

16. "A major one which no one can overlook is technological and based on inventions and discoveries which have altered the whole basis of production and deeply affected social relations."
Author: Emily Greene Balch

17. "And it did me no good to recall particular conversations (if indeed these were particular conversations I was remembering so vividly, rather than inventions of my uneasy brain). Remembering clarified nothing."
Author: Emma Donoghue

18. "Quittant Neuilly pour Paris XVIe, nous sommes entrés dans une vitesse sans mémoire, la rapidité des gens qui n'ont plus de temps à perdre, ou plutôt : nous inventions une nouvelle bourgeoisie qui n'avait plus le luxe de s'intéresser au temps perdu."
Author: Frédéric Beigbeder

19. "From stoplights to skyscrapers, turn anywhere in civilization and you will see imagination at work. It's in our inventions, advances and remedies and how a single parent masterminds each day. Imagination is boundless, surrounds us and resides in us all."
Author: Geoffrey S. Fletcher

20. "Men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least, for they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect idea that they subsequently express with their hands."
Author: Giorgio Vasari

21. "Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impatsi of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can't create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don't in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough."
Author: Gregory Maguire

22. "Well that ain't so. You get babies from each other. But there's this man, too—he has all these babies just waitin‘ to wake up, he breathes life into 'em…" Dill was off again. Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions. He could add and subtract faster than lightning, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies. He was slowly talking himself to sleep and taking me with him, but in the quietness of his foggy island there rose the faded image of a gray house with sad brown doors. "Dill?" "Mm?" "Why do you reckon Boo Radley's never run off?" Dill sighed a long sigh and turned away from me. "Maybe he doesn't have anywhere to run off to…"
Author: Harper Lee

23. "He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions. He could add and subtract faster than lightning, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies. He was slowly talking himself to sleep and taking me with him, but in the quietness of his foggy island there rose the faded image of gray house with sad brown doors. (Lee 164)"
Author: Harper Lee

24. "He had always assumed gossip to be the malicious whispering of uncomfortable truths not the fabrication of absurdities. How was one to protect oneself against people making up things Was a life of careful impeccable behavior not enough in a world where inventions were passed around as fact"
Author: Helen Simonson

25. "I'm afraid for all those who'll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines. What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!"
Author: Henrik Ibsen

26. "Either stick to tradition or see that your inventions be consistent."
Author: Horace

27. "I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned, or a style of frock, a real public person, even a make of car. Then, I thought, I had a measure, I could guage the quality of the writing by its accuracy, by the extent to which it aligned with my own impressions, or improved upon them. I was fortunate that most English writing of the time was in the form of undemanding social documentary. I wasn't impressed by those writers (they were spread between South and North America) who infiltrated their own pages as part of the cast, determined to remind poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions and the there was a difference between fiction and life. Or, to the contrary, to insist that life was a fiction anyway. Only writers, I thought, were ever in danger of confusing the two."
Author: Ian McEwan

28. "I think the two greatest inventions in the history of mankind are the remote control and the fingernail clipper. Now, if someone could just combine those two, I'd be very eager to clip my nails from across the room."
Author: Jarod Kintz

29. "It's one of my inventions-a shampoo," Athena explained. "Anyway, I didn't know it would do"-she gestured toward the snakes-"that."
Author: Joan Holub

30. "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

31. "Laugh if you will... They laughed at all great ideas and inventions. They laughed at nitrous oxide."
Author: John Sladek

32. "Faith has not increased in the world, nor has righteousness, nor obedience to God. What the world needs today is to draw nearer to the Lord. We need more humble, abiding faith in our Redeemer, more love in our hearts for our Eternal Father and for our fellow men. We live in a wonderful age. The great inventions of our day exceed what was known in all former ages. Unfortunately these inventions have failed to bring men nearer to God"
Author: Joseph Fielding Smith

33. "Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions."
Author: Joyce Carol Oates

34. "Inventions have long-since reached their limit--and I see no hope for further developments." -- Julius Frontinus, world-famous engineer (Rome, 10 AD)"
Author: Julius Frontinus

35. "The deviant and the conformist...are creatures of the same culture, inventions of the same imagination."
Author: Kai Theodor Erikson

36. "While human ingenuity may devise various inventions to the same ends, it will never devise anything more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than nature does, because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous."
Author: Leonardo Da Vinci

37. "God's work must be done, in every thing, according to his own will. His institutions neither need nor admit men's inventions to make them either more beautiful or more likely to answer the intention of them. 'Add thou not unto his words.' God is pleased with willing worship, but not with will-worship."
Author: Matthew Henry

38. "It is not reasonable that art should win the place of honor over our great and powerful mother Nature. We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of her works by our inventions that we have quite smothered her."
Author: Michel De Montaigne

39. "He said he would be back and we'd drink wine togetherHe said that everything would be better than beforeHe said we were on the edge of a new relationHe said he would never again cringe before his fatherHe said that he was going to invent full-timeHe said he loved me that going into meHe said was going into the world and the skyHe said all the buckles were very firmHe said the wax was the best waxHe said Wait for me here on the beachHe said Just don't cryI remember the gulls and the wavesI remember the islands going dark on the seaI remember the girls laughingI remember they said he only wanted to get away from meI remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lotI remember she told me those who try out inventions are worseI remember she added : Women who love such are the worst of allI have been waiting all day, or perhaps longer.I would have liked to try those wings myself.It would have been better than this."
Author: Muriel Rukeyser

40. "When he dipped into the mysteries of nature, he was sure that there must be a God. Who else could create such lovely works of art? Man's inventions could only ape those of his Creator. On the other hand, it was the same God who ensured that people died like flies, carried off by plague and war. It was difficult in such times to believe in God, but Jakob Kuisl discovered Him in the beauties of nature."
Author: Oliver Pötzsch

41. "Reading may be the last secretive behavior that is neither pathological or prosecutable. It is certainly the last refuge from the real-time epidemic. For the stream of a narrative overflows the banks of the real. Story strips its reader, holding her in a place time can't reach. A book's power lies in its ability to erase us, to expand or contract without limit, to circle inside itself without beginning or end, to defy our imaginary timetables and lay us bare to a more basic ticking. The pages we read are a nowhen, unfolding far outside the public arena. As long as we remain in them, now reveals itself to be the baldest of inventions."
Author: Richard Powers

42. "Standard languages are inventions, most of them confined to a recent period in human history. They are codes that give access not to clear thinking and basic decency but to the structured parts of our lives such as job interviews, political speeches, literary essays, novels, and the like. They signal education and learning, but they are not the same thing as education and learning."
Author: Robert Lane Greene

43. "The very greatest things - great thoughts, discoveries, inventions - have usually been nurtured in hardship, often pondered over in sorrow, and at length established with difficulty."
Author: Samuel Smiles

44. "And then I wonder who I'm looking at. All these people must have their dreams, too. And maybe that's why they're on the bus to New York City. Maybe they want to be dancers, or singers, or run big companies, or sell inventions. It's strange to try to think of everyone else like that, like my brain isn't big enough to hold all their stories together inside my head, and it makes me feel wobbly to try and imagine all the hopes and dreams that fill up this bus."
Author: Sarah Rubin

45. "All great inventions emerge from a long sequence of small sparks; the first idea often isn't all that good, but thanks to collaboration it later sparks another idea, or it's reinterpreted in an unexpected way. Collaboration brings small sparks together to generate breakthrough innovation."
Author: Scott Belsky

46. "Inspirations sleet through the universe continuously. Their destination, as if they cared, is the right mind in the right place at the right time. They hit the right neuron, there's a chain reaction, and a little while later someone is blinking furiously in the TV lights and wondering how the hell he came up with the idea of pre-sliced bread in the first place.Leonard of Quirm knew about inspirations. One of his earliest inventions was an earthed metal nightcap, worn in the hope that the damned things would stop leaving their white-hot trails across his tortured imagination. It seldom worked. He knew the shame of waking up to find the sheets covered with nocturnal sketches of seige engines for apple-peeling machines."
Author: Terry Pratchett

47. "Prototypes of inventions that use novel combinations of resonance, magnetism, states of matter, certain geometries or inward swirling motion to unlock the secrets of universal energy have already been built. They provide proof of new or rediscovered principles. In many variations of these inventions, a small input triggers a disproportionately large output of useable power.""These energy converters don't violate any laws of physics if they simply tap into a previously unrecognized source of power - background space. A flow of energy from that source can continue day and night, whether or not the sun shines or the wind blows."
Author: Testy McTesterson

48. "But what has America to boast? What are the graces or the virtues which distinguish its inhabitants? What are their triumphs in war, or their inventions in peace?"
Author: Thomas Day

49. "It is naturally given to all men to esteem their own inventions best."
Author: Thomas More

50. "Trippers and askers surround me,People I meet.... the effect upon me of my early life..... of the ward and city I live in....of the nation,The latest news....discoveries, inventions, societies.... authors old and new,My dinner, dress, associates, looks, business, compliments, dues,The real or fancified indifference of some man or woman I love,The sickness of one of my folks- or of myself....or ill-doing....or loss or lack of money....or depressions or exaltations,They come to me days and nights and go from me again,But they are not the Me myself."
Author: Walt Whitman

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