Invention Quotes - Page 12

• Truth is always consistent with itself, and needs nothing to help it out. It is always near at hand, and sits upon our lips, and is ready to drop out before we are aware; whereas a lie is troublesome, and sets a man's invention upon the rack; and one trick needs a great many more to make it good.

  John Tillotson

  Truth, Lying, Men

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• The first inventions of commerce are, like those of all other arts, cunning and short-sighted.

  John Philpot Curran

  Art, Firsts, Cunning

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• we can't be creative if we refuse to be confused. Change always starts with confusion; cherished interpretations must dissolve to make way for what's new. Great ideas and inventions miraculously appear in the space of not knowing.

  Margaret J. Wheatley

  Change, Confused, Ideas

  Margaret J. Wheatley (2002). “Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future”, p.37, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

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• From this haunting feeling of being not wanted, which remained a recurrent haunt through life, I found two ways of escape, both of which in changing form also persisted. One was the invention of gods, the other was personal efficiency in work.

  Anna Louise Strong

  Two, Feelings, Way

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• There is an unlucky tendency ... to allow every new invention to add to life's complications, and every new power to increase life's hustling; so that, unless we can dominate the mischief, we are really the worse off instead of the better.

  Vernon Lee

  Hustle, Progress, Add

  Vernon Lee (1904). “Hortus vitae : essays on the garden of life”

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• All the beautiful orders of architecture and creations of the pencil, all the conceptions of the beautiful in nature and art and humanity, are inventions extorted, as it were, from the mind to extend and increase the pleasures of sense.

  Elihu Burritt

  Beautiful, Art, Order

  Elihu Burritt, Mary Botham Howitt (1854). “Thoughts and things at home and abroad”, p.72

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• In these days the invention of printing, and the diffusion of knowledge, render historical calumnies a little less dangerous: truth will always prevail in the long run, but how slow its progress!

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Running, Long, Historical

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• Once various forms were signed, I was separated from my free will, led down the corridors into a room which was now to be the boundary of my existence, told to surrender my clothes, handed that comic invention, the hospital gown, and sent to bed in broad daylight like a child being stripped of her privileges.

  Dorothy West

  Children, Clothes, Bed

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• Bearing in mind that "the market" is not an invention of capitalism but that it has existed for thousands of years in many different societies, social justice logically requires that the profits resulting from the operation of markets and infrastructures created by society be equitably shared within societies and in a larger context within the human family.

  Alfred-Maurice de Zayas

  Years, Justice, Mind

  "Interim report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, Alfred Maurice de Zayas". August 09, 2012.

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• Yes, the mistrust of poetry has a long history, for a variety of reasons, but they all come down to sentiment and invention over fact and truth. Figurative language is suspicious.

  Mary Ruefle

  Long, Facts, Language

  Mary Ruefle (2012). “Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures”, p.42, Wave Books

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• Although it is tempting to imagine an ancient era innocent of biochemical weaponry, in fact this Pandora's box of horrors was opened thousands of years ago. The history of making war with biological weapons begins in mythology, in ancient oral traditions that preserved records of actual events and ideas of the era before the invention of written histories.

  Adrienne Mayor

  War, Ideas, Years

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• S. E. Smith's I Live in a Hut has a deceptively simple title, considering that the brain in that hut contains galaxies-worth of invention: At night when your soldiers are praying ceaselessly for less rain and more underwear my soldiers make underwear out of rain. These poems seesaw between despair and delight but delight is winning the battle. Smith is a somersaulting tightrope walker of a poet and her poems will make you look at anything and everything with new eyes: For days I tried to rub the new freckle // off my hand until I realized what it was / and began to grant it its sovereignty.

  Matthea Harvey

  Rain, Eye, Simple

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• Every new project I do is a new invention of myself and reinvigorates me as to why I love the industry.

  David Gordon Green

  New Inventions, Projects, Industry

  Source: www.moviesonline.ca

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• I was 12 when I ordered my first guitar out of the worn and discolored pages of the Sears and Roebuck catalog. The story that I bought it on the installment plan is untrue, the invention of a Hollywood press agent. Local color. I paid cash, $8, money I had saved as a hired hand on my uncle Calvin's farm, baling and stacking hay. Prairie hay, used as feed for the cattle in winter. It was mean work for a wiry boy, but ambition made me strong.

  Gene Autry

  Strong, Uncles, Ambition

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• My current computer, in addition to 'DOS,' has 'Windows,' which is another invention of Bill Gates, designed as a security measure to thwart those users who are somehow able to get past DOS.

  Dave Barry

  Past, Bills, Able

  "Lost in cyberspace" by Dave Barry, www.washingtonpost.com. February 6, 1994.

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• It seems to me that God is a convenient invention of the human mind

  Isaac Asimov

  Mind, Humans, Convenient

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• Oft in dreams invention we bestow to change a flounce or add a furbelow.

  Alexander Pope

  Dream, Add

  Alexander Pope, Alexander Dyce (1835). “The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope”, p.81

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• If Christianity is a mere invention of man, and the Bible is not from God, how can infidels explain Jesus Christ? His existence in history they cannot deny. How is it that without force or bribery, without arms or money, He has made such an immensely deep mark on the world as He certainly has?

  J. C. Ryle

  Jesus, Men, World

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• If kissing is man's greatest invention, then fermentation and patriarchy compete with the domestication of animals for the distinction of being man's worst folly, and no doubt the three combined long ago, the one growing out of the others, to foster civilization and lead Western humanity to its present state of decline.

  Tom Robbins

  Kissing, Men, Animal

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues”, p.285, Bantam

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• The main ingredient of the first quantum revolution, wave-particle duality, has led to inventions such as the transistor and the laser that are at the root of the information society.

  Alain Aspect

  Roots, Information, Lasers

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• All preceptors should have that kind of genius described by Tacitus, "equal to their business, but not above it;" a patient industry, with competent erudition; a mind depending more on its correctness than its originality, and on its memory rather than on its invention.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Memories, Teaching, Should Have

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.161

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• So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.

  Paul Theroux

  Men, Istanbul, Sight

  Paul Theroux (1976). “The great railway bazaar: by train through Asia”

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• To start with invention is the mark of the fertile mind ... and leads later to the interpretation of experience; to start with the reproduction of experience is the infallible index of a barren invention.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Mind, Mathematics, Barren

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• The city is a cultural invention enforcing on the citizen knowledge of his own nature. And this we do not like. That we are aggressive beings, easily given to violence; that we get along together because we must more than because we want to, and that the brotherhood of man is about as far from reality today as it was two thousand years ago; that reason's realm is small; that we never have been and never shall be created equal; that if the human being is perfectible, he has so far exhibited few symptoms - all are considerations of man from which space tends to protect us.

  Robert Ardrey

  Reality, Men, Years

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• 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.

  William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Beautiful, Voice, Rocks

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