Inventor Quotes - Page 11

• A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.

  Igor Stravinsky

  Inspiration, House, Architect

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• Nothing retains its form; new shapes from old. Nature, the great inventor, ceaselessly contrives. In all creation, be assured, there is no death - no death, but only change and innovation; what we men call birth is but a different new beginning; death is but to cease to be the same. Perhaps this may have moved to that, and that to this, yet still the sum of things remains the same.

  Ovid

  Death, New Beginnings, Men

  Ovid,, A. D. Melville, E. J. Kenney (2008). “Metamorphoses”, p.359, Oxford University Press

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• Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, said that whenever he could not see his way clearly, he knelt down and prayed for light and understanding.

  Nathan Eldon Tanner

  Technology, Light, Understanding

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• When the inventor of the drawing board messed things up, what did he go back to?

  Bob Monkhouse

  Drawing, Boards

  "They're not laughing now". www.theguardian.com. December 29, 2003.

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• A new gadget that lasts only five minutes is worth more than an immortal work that bores everyone.

  Francis Picabia

  Work, Gadgets, Lasts

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• I wanted to be an inventor, whatever I thought that meant then. I guess I was thinking of Edison or maybe James Watt. Or maybe even Newton.

  David Antin

  Thinking, Newton, James Watt

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• Greater consumption due to increase in population and growth of income heightens scarcity and induces price run-ups. A higher price represents an opportunity that leads inventors and businesspeople to seek new ways to satisfy the shortages. Some fail, at cost to themselves. A few succeed, and the final result is that we end up better off than if the original shortage problems had never arisen. That is, we need our problems, though this does not imply that we should purposely create additional problems for ourselves.

  Julian Simon

  Running, Opportunity, Growth

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• At the Egyptian city of Naucratis there was a famous old god whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis was sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters.

  Plato

  Art, Science, Discovery

  Plato (2010). “The Works of Plato: The Trial and Death of Socrates”, p.442, Cosimo, Inc.

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• The inventor is a man who looks around 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. The spirit of invention possesses him, seeking materialization.

  Alexander Graham Bell

  Men, Ideas, Looks

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• I had studied Dadaism after the Second World War. What attracted me to this movement was the style its inventors used when not engaged in Dadaistic activities. It was clear, luminous, simple without being banal, precise without being narrow; it was a style adapted to the expression of thought as well as of emotion. I connected this style with the Dadaistic exercises themselves

  Paul Feyerabend

  War, Exercise, Simple

  Paul Feyerabend (1993). “Against Method”, p.265, Verso

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• I remember mother saying   :    Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Mother, Remember, Poet

  Muriel Rukeyser (1994). “Out of Silence: Selected Poems”, p.138, Northwestern University Press

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• Man is/the symbol-using (symbol making, symbol-misusing) animal/inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative)/separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making/goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order)/and rotten with perfection.

  Kenneth Burke

  Animal, Men, Order

  Kenneth Burke (1973). “Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature and Method”, p.16, Univ of California Press

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• Because of the love affair between the American public and the stock market, it is possible for entrepreneurs, technological visionaries and inventors of every sort to get financing.

  Ron Chernow

  Entrepreneur, Visionaries, Affair

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• Monsieur Franqulin, inventor of electricity. This
  illustrious savant, after having made several voyages around the
  world, died on the Sandwich Islands and was devoured by savages,
  of whom not a single fragment was ever recovered.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Islands, Savages, Sandwiches

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.64, University of Georgia Press

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• My dad was an inventor, and I think I've always had a rosy view of technology, or at least its potential.

  Scott McCloud

  Dad, Technology, Thinking

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. August 23, 2000.

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• An invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor.

  Eli Whitney

  Invention, Valuable, Worthless

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• An inventor is someone who makes another man rich.

  David Sarnoff

  Men, Rich, Another Man

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• Few have heard of Fra Luca Pacioli, the inventor of double-entry bookkeeping; but he has probably had much more influence on human life than has Dante or Michelangelo.

  Herbert J. Muller

  Influence, Human Life, Heard

  Uses of the Past ch. 8 (1957)

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• 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.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Music, Men, Mediocrity

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1993). “Self-reliance, and Other Essays”, p.114, Courier Corporation

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• There's a radical - and wonderful - new idea here... that all children could and should be inventors of their own theories, critics of other people's ideas, analyzers of evidence, and makers of their own personal marks on the world. Its an idea with revolutionary implications. If we take it seriously.

  Deborah Meier

  Children, Ideas, People

  Deborah Meier (2002). “The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem”, p.4, Beacon Press

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• The great creators-the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors-stood alone against the men of their time.

  Ayn Rand

  Artist, Men, Fountainhead

  Ayn Rand (1999). “Ayn Rand Reader”, p.72, Penguin

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• great inventors and discoverers seem to have made their discoveries and inventions as it were by the way, in the course of their everyday life.

  Elizabeth Charles

  Discovery, Innovation, Everyday

  Elizabeth Rundle Charles (1865). “Chronicles of the Schönberg-Cotta Family”, p.40

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• The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic 'right-brain' thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't.

  Daniel H. Pink

  Creativity, Artist, Creative

  "A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future". Book by Daniel H. Pink, www.huffingtonpost.com. 2006.

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• The greatest inventors are unknown to us. Someone invented the wheel - but who?

  Isaac Asimov

  Wheels

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• 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 entire world view, he is the inventor of entire forms of like.

  Paul Feyerabend

  Children, Men, Artist

  "Science in a Free Society". Book by Paul Feyerabend, 1978.

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