Inventor Quotes

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

2. "The inventor...looks upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world; he is haunted by an idea."
Author: Alexander Graham Bell

3. "These are bagpipes. I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the man-made sound never equalled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig."
Author: Alfred Hitchcock

4. "Racial history is therefore natural history and the mysticism of the soul at one and the same time; but the history of the religion of the blood, conversely, is the great world story of the rise and downfall of peoples, their heroes and thinkers, their inventors and artists."
Author: Alfred Rosenberg

5. "An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind."
Author: Ayn Rand

6. "CALVIN:When I grow up I want to be an inventor. First I will invent a time machine. Then I'll come back to yesterday and take myself to tomorrow and skip this dumb assignment."
Author: Bill Watterson

7. "This act [creation], as it is for God, must always remain totally inconceivable to man. For we--even our poets and musicians and inventors--never, in the ultimate sense make. We only build. We always have materials to build from. All we can know about the act of creation must be derived from what we can gather about the relation of the creatures to their Creator"
Author: C.S. Lewis

8. "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
Author: Carl Sagan

9. "Coffee and chocolate—the inventor of mocha should be sainted."
Author: Cherise Sinclair

10. "My inventory of people who can save me is down to just me."
Author: Chuck Palahniuk

11. "When women reassert their relationship with the wildish nature, they are gifted with a permanent and internal watcher, a knower, a visionary, an oracle, an inspiratrice, an intuitive, a maker, a creator, an inventor, and a listener who guide, suggest, and urge vibrant life in the inner and outer world."
Author: Clarissa Pinkola Estes

12. "God so understood is not something posed over against the universe, in addition to it, nor is he the universe itself. He is not a "being," at least not in the way that a tree, a shoemaker, or a god is a being; he is not one more object in the inventory of things that are, or any sort of discrete object at all. Rather, all things that exist receive their being continuously from him, who is the infinite wellspring of all that is, in whom (to use the language of the Christian scriptures) all things live and move and have their being."
Author: David Bentley Hart

13. "I can't recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate."
Author: Dennis Ritchie

14. "Donegan Bane and Gracious O'Callahan - the Monster Hunters. Adventurers, inventors, authors of Monster Hunting for Beginners and it's sequels, Monster Hunting for Beginners is Probably Inadvisable and Seriously, Dude, Stop Monster Hunting."
Author: Derek Landy

15. "One job of the unconscious is to act as a workshop for rough-shaping ideas; crafting notions as new parts or tools become available; storing observations until something relevant appears in the landscape -- generally soaking, simmering, and incubating ideas. Gradually, while combing through its inventory, it finds bits and pieces that create a pattern. When it slips knowledge of that pattern to the conscious mind, it's a surprise, like a telegram slid under the door."
Author: Diane Ackerman

16. "Never let an inventor run a company. You can never get him to stop tinkering and bring something to market."
Author: E. F. Schumacher

17. "They're measurements which express the goal of making money perfectly well, but which also permit you to develop operational rules for running your plant," he says. "There are three of them. Their names are throughput, inventory and operational expense."
Author: Eliyahu M. Goldratt

18. "The patent system was established, I believe, to protect the lone inventor. In this it has not succeeded. … The patent system protects the institutions which favor invention."
Author: Ernst Alexanderson

19. "The greatest events- they are not noisiest but our stillest hours. The world revolves, not around the inventors of new noises, but around the inventors of new values; it revolves inaudibly."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

20. "They say that a man has to want to quit before he can stop working, that nobody can stop working for him. His first step is to make a fearless inventory of his life and admit to himself that he has a job."
Author: Gary Reilly

21. "He makes you feel that if you only had a little more time, you, too, might be an inventor."
Author: Helen Keller

22. "We have scholars galore, and kings and emperors, and statesmen and military leaders, and artists in profusion, and inventors, discoverers, explorers - but where are the great lovers? After a moment's reflection one is back to Abelard and Heloise, or Anthony and Cleopatra, or the story of the Taj Mahal. So much of it is fictive, expanded and glorified by the poverty-stricken lovers whose prayers are answered only by myth and legend."
Author: Henry Miller

23. "That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world."
Author: J. M. Coetzee

24. "I rooted through my pocketbook and did a fast paraphernalia inventory. I was carrying defense spray, which was a big no-no in a crowded mall. And I carried a stun gun, which on close examination turned out to need a new battery. My two pairs of cuffs were in working order, and I had an almost full can of hair spray. Okay, probably I wasn't the world's best-equipped bounty hunter. But then what did I really need to bring in an old guy with a nose that looked like a penis and a loser hot dog vendor?"
Author: Janet Evanovich

25. "Bookstores will not disappear but will exploit digital technologies to increase their virtual and physical inventories, and perhaps become publishers themselves."
Author: Jason Epstein

26. "He likes to know things. He checks out book and record collections when he visits people, looks in medicine cabinets, takes inventory in refrigerators. He eaves drops on conversations at public phone booths. He reads murder victims' mail."
Author: John Sayles

27. "People have laughed at all great inventors and discoverers."
Author: John Sladek

28. "If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners."
Author: Johnny Carson

29. "This is the sixty-nine," I told him, presenting the magazine in front of him. I put my fingers -- two of them -- on the action, so that he would not overlook it. "Why is it dubbed sixty-nine?" he asked, because he is a person hot on fire with curiosity. "It was invented in 1969. My friend Gregory knows a friend of the nephew of the inventor." "What did people do before 1969?" "Merely blowjobs and masticating box, but never in chorus."
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer

30. "That room was Rolandsen's world. Rolandsen was not just irresponsibility and inebriation, he was also great thinker and inventor. There was a smell of acids that permeated the corridor and came to the notice of every visitor. Rolandsen made no secret of the fact that he had all these medicaments there solely to disguise the aroma of all the brandy he consumed. But this was part of an act designed purely to give himself an air of inscrutability."
Author: Knut Hamsun

31. "Innovators need to be disagreeable. By disagreeable, I don't mean obnoxious or unpleasant. I mean that on that fifth dimension of the Big Five personality inventory, "agreeableness," they tend to be on the far end of the continuum. They are people willing to take social risks—to do things that others might disapprove of."
Author: Malcolm Gladwell

32. "God wants you to face the reasons why you separate yourself from Him. He will show you what you fear, what you need, and what you desire. He will inventory your beliefs and values, and help you line them up with His truth."
Author: Michael Barbarulo

33. "If pride really went before a fall, then, Lucifer is the inventor of pride."
Author: Michael Bassey Johnson

34. "As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation. The desire he felt, watching Joe, was unquestionably physical, but in the sense that Sammy wanted to inhabit the body of his cousin, not possess it. It was, in part, a longing--common enough among the inventors of heroes--to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that always ran afoul of his perennial inability to locate an actual self to be improved. Joe Kavalier had an air of competence, of faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the whole of his life, had finally learned only to fake."
Author: Michael Chabon

35. "I'm not a great inventor from scratch. What I do is to use, steal, acquire, reproduce or re-cycle music from other musicians."
Author: Michael Nyman

36. "Don't let the secret recipe die with the inventor."
Author: Nathan Myhrvold

37. "Today, people idolize athletes and celebrities - and yes, highly successful and visionary business people like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but not the innovators who perhaps have not seen such high-flying levels of success. Can anyone name the inventors of GPS, which has such a huge impact on our lives today?"
Author: Naveen Jain

38. "I sat at the foot of a huge tree, a statue of the night, and tried to make an inventory of all I had seen, heard, smelled, and felt: dizziness, horror, stupor, astonishment, joy, enthusiasm, nausea, inescapable attraction. What had attracted me? It was difficult to say: Human kind cannot bear much reality. Yes, the excess of reality had become an unreality, but that unreality had turned suddenly into a balcony from which I peered into—what? Into that which is beyond and still has no name…"
Author: Octavio Paz

39. "The great and golden rule of art as well as of life, wrote William Blake, is that the more distinct, sharp and defined the boundary line, the more perfect is the work of art; and the less keen and sharp the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and bungling. ‘Great inventors in all ages knew this - Michael Angelo and Albert Durer are known by this and by this alone'; and another time he wrote, with all the simple directness of nineteenth-century prose, ‘to generalise is to be an idiot."
Author: Oscar Wilde

40. "I maintain that many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practice the dull craft of experimental psychology."
Author: Oswald Spengler

41. "A scientist, an artist, a citizen is not like a child who needs papa methodology and mama rationality to give him security and direction; he can take care of himself, for he is the inventor not only of laws, theories, pictures, plays, forms of music, ways of dealing with his fellow man, institutions but also of entire world views, he is the inventor of entire forms of life."
Author: Paul Karl Feyerabend

42. "His problem was the eternal question: What should he be? Inventor, scientist, artist—the energy he felt surging through him, an energy far more than physical and yet pervading the restlessness of his body, was a burden to him until he could find the path for its release."
Author: Pearl S. Buck

43. "The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

44. "I'm an inventor. I became interested in long-term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started."
Author: Ray Kurzweil

45. "Joseph Smith, its enterprisingly mendacious inventor, went to the lengths of composing a complete new holy book, the Book of Mormon, inventing from scratch a whole new bogus American history, written in bogus seventeenth-century English."
Author: Richard Dawkins

46. "Come on," I said. "Let's reconnect this bad boy." Getting the dragon's head to the bottom was easy. It tumbled right down the slope and hit the neck with a loud, metallic BONK! Reconnecting it was harder. We had no tools and no experience. Annabeth fiddled with the wires and cursed in Ancient Greek. "We need Beckendorf. He could do this in seconds." "Isn't your mom the goddess of inventors?" I asked. Annabeth glared at me. "Yes, but this is different. I'm good with ideas. Not mechanics." "If I was going to pick one person in the world to reattach my head," I said, "I'd pick you." I just blurted it out—to give her confidence, I guess— but immediately I realized it sounded pretty stupid. "Awww. . ." Silena sniffled and wiped her eyes. "Percy, that is so sweet!"
Author: Rick Riordan

47. "Cheesecake. Are you shitting me? Who invented that? Probably Jesus of Nazareth. Or maybe Louis Pasteur. It makes me physically sick to think that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, yet the name of the inventor of cheesecake isn't tattooed on Dick Cheney's face."
Author: Rob Delaney

48. "Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio - all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another."
Author: Steven Johnson

49. "Myth: US housing market is in recovery. Fact: Big banks have been hiding their bloated home inventory, seized by virtue of home foreclosures."
Author: Ziad K. Abdelnour

50. "The wealth of America isn't an inventory of goods; it's an organic,living entity, a fragile, pulsing fabric of ideas, expectations, loyalties,moral commitments, visions, and people. To slice it up like an applepie and redistribute it would destroy it just as surely as trying to shareStephen Hawking's intellect by sharing slices of his brain would surelykill him."
Author: Ziad K. Abdelnour

Inventor Quotes Pictures