Inventing Quotes - Page 4

• I don't know whether I am different from other people. Perhaps I am. Perhaps no one has a personality, and people are inventing themselves in the context in which they find themselves.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  People, Personality, Different

  4 Copy quote

• Most people just want to be part of the world, they want to live, love, and enjoy themselves - to take part in the world around them. Whereas artists are always retreating, locking the door, and inventing other worlds.

  Paul Auster

  Artist, Doors, Other Worlds

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy and Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

  43 Copy quote

  Show source

• America is a country of inventors, and the greatest of inventors are the newspaper men.

  Alexander Graham Bell

  Country, Men, America

  88 Copy quote

• I really wish I had invented the flip-flop. I love flip-flops. It's the one style of shoe I would be so proud of inventing: the Havaiana.

  Christian Louboutin

  Shoes, Style, Wish

  8 Copy quote

• An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Arrogance, Firsts, Claims

  "A Theory of Roughness". Interview with John Brockman, www.edge.org. December 20, 2004.

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

  George Orwell

  Jobs, Book, Feelings

  George Orwell, Keith Gessen (2009). “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays”, p.289, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Personal identity seems like it's just such an American archetype, from Holly Golightly re-inventing herself in 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' to Jay Gatsby in 'The Great Gatsby.' It seems like the sort of archetypal American issue. If you're given the freedom to be anything, or be anyone, what do you do with it?

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Issues, Hollies, Identity

  Interview with TashaR, www.avclub.com. November 13, 2002.

  53 Copy quote

  Show source

• To me, to spend all the time and energy and face all those creative challenges that you would spend for a two hour movie, you're inventing a world, you're inventing characters. If they're interesting enough, they should be compelling enough to go for five more episodes. How incredibly frustrating would it be to just do one movie?

  Melissa Rosenberg

  Character, Two, Interesting

  4 Copy quote

• In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Self, Miracle, Mirages

  Douglas R. Hofstadter (2008). “I Am a Strange Loop”, p.363, Basic Books

  33 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think there’s no greater joy than completing a song out of thin air. It’s like inventing something, but it’s invisible, you know? It’s weird. It amazes me. You can send it out in the world, and that’s the joy. It’s like giving birth to all these songs and letting them go like they’re your kids.

  Jason Mraz

  Song, Kids, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• I enjoy inventing things out of fun. After all, life is a game, not a career.

  Brion Gysin

  Fun, Games, Careers

  "Brion Gysin: Tuning in to the Multimedia Age". Book edited by Jose Ferez Kuri (p. 4), 2003.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple

  Gene Wilder

  Funny, Humorous, Directors

  654 Copy quote

• How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Loss, Losing, Foolish

  Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “Prodigal Summer”, p.162, Faber & Faber

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Disney made a fortune out of inventing the businessman's idea of the imaginary as the contradictory of the businessman's idea of the real.

  David Antin

  Real, Ideas, Made

  7 Copy quote

• Women can do anything men can do. Except math, chess, running, jumping, lifting stuff, fixing things, making money, hockey, surfing, driving, making decisions, being tall, taking out the garbage, tipping, fishing, being funny (on purpose), reading a map, listening to good bands, writing, running the country, inventing anything important, or being fun to hang out with.

  Daniel Tosh

  Country, Running, Fun

  99 Copy quote

• It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership.

  William Kittredge

  Art, War, Believe

  William Kittredge (2002). “Owning It All: Essays”, Graywolf Pr

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• We cannot step aside and say that we have achieved our goal by inventing a new drug or a new way by which to treat presently incurable diseases, a new way to help those who suffer from malnutrition, or the creation of ideal balanced diets on a worldwide scale. We cannot rest till the way has been found, with our help, to bring our finest achievement to everyone.

  George W. Bush

  Science, Medicine, Goal

  8 Copy quote

• The game was that of continually inventing a possible world, or a piece of a possible world, and then of comparing it with the real world... a race without end... What mattered more than the answers were the questions... For me, this world of questions and the provisional, this chase after an answer that was always put off to the next day, all that was euphoric. I lived in the future... I had turned my anxiety into my profession.

  Francois Jacob

  Real, Ignorance, Race

  15 Copy quote

• Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once (gleich dies zusammen). What a delight this is I cannot tell ! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing lively dream.

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

  Dream, Imagination, Delight

  "Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart".

  33 Copy quote

  Show source

• Mankind . . . possesses two supreme blessings. First of these is the goddess Demeter, or Earth whichever name you choose to call her by. It was she who gave to man his nourishment of grain. But after her there came the son of Semele, who matched her present by inventing liquid wine as his gift to man. For filled with that good gift, suffering mankind forgets its grief; from it comes sleep; with it oblivion of the troubles of the day. There is no other medicine for misery.

  Euripides

  Grief, Wine, Sleep

  Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (1958). “The complete Greek tragedies”

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• 'Do you know,' he asked in a delicious accent, 'what Dom Pérignon said after inventing champagne?' 'No?' I said. 'He called out to his fellow monks, 'Come quickly: I am tasting the stars!'

  John Green

  Stars, Wine, Monk

  4 Copy quote

• Some say Christianity is just a crutch. But let's turn the question on its edge for a moment. Is atheism an emotional crutch, wishful thinking? The ax cuts both ways. Perhaps atheists are rejecting God because they've had a bad relationship with their father. Instead of inventing God, have atheists invented non-God? Have they invented atheism to escape some of the frightening implications of God's existence? Think about it.

  Greg Koukl

  Atheist, Father, Cutting

  "Is Atheism a Crutch?". str.typepad.com. March 24, 2010.

  51 Copy quote

  Show source

• The current disfavor into which socialism has fallen has spurred.... the frenzy to proclaim oneself a liberal. Many writers today have recourse to the strategem of inventing for oneself a liberalism according to one's own tastes and passing it off as an evolution from past ideas.

  Ralph Raico

  Philosophy, Past, Ideas

  6 Copy quote

• From this time everything was copulated. Acetic, formic, butyric, margaric, &c., acids, alkaloids, ethers, amides, anilides, all became copulated bodies. So that to make acetanilide, for example, they no longer employed acetic acid and aniline, but they re-copulated a copulated oxalic acid with a copulated ammonia. I am inventing nothing-altering nothing. Is it my fault if, when writing history, I appear to be composing a romance?

  Auguste Laurent

  Writing, Science, Romance

  David M. Knight, Auguste Laurent (1998). “The Development of Chemistry, 1789-1914: Chemical method”, p.204, Taylor & Francis

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language.

  Mark Twain

  German Language, Awful, Toothache

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.148, Courier Corporation

  11 Copy quote

  Show source