Inventor Quotes - Page 8

• Da Vinci was as great a mechanic and inventor as were Newton and his friends. Yet a glance at his notebooks shows us that what fascinated him about nature was its variety, its infinite adaptability, the fitness and the individuality of all its parts. By contrast what made astronomy a pleasure to Newton was its unity, its singleness, its model of a nature in which the diversified parts were mere disguises for the same blank atoms.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Notebook, Nature, Science

  Jacob Bronowski (2011). “The Common Sense of Science”, p.16, Faber & Faber

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• Transformation of any kind always exacts a holy tussle. The newborn butterfly struggles to open its wings so it can conjure up the strength to fly. So, too, with artists, inventors, mystics, and entrepreneurs.

  Tama J. Kieves

  Strong, Struggle, Butterfly

  Tama J. Kieves (2004). “This Time I Dance!: Trusting the Journey of Creating the Work You Love”, Tarcher

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• Our society loves to romanticize the idea of the single, solo inventor who, working late in the lab one night, makes an earthshaking discovery, and voila, overnight everything's changed. That's a very appealing picture; however, it's just not true. Medicine today is a team sport.

  Nguyen Quyen

  Sports, Team, Night

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• I owe all my knowledge to the German inventor, Johannes Gutenberg!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Knowledge, Science, Gutenberg

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• I've been an amature inventor for a long time.

  Billy Sheehan

  Long, Long Time

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• genius is original, unique; and in whatever form it may develop itself is the greatest gift that can be given to man, the strongest known link between the material life we have and the spiritual life that we can only guess at. Every great poet, painter, or musician - every inventor or man of science, every fine actor or orator, comes to us as the exponent of something diviner than we know. We cannot understand it, but we feel it, and acknowledge it.

  Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

  Spiritual, Men, Unique

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• Th'invention all admir'd, and each, how he to be th'inventor miss'd; so easy it seem'd once found, which yet unfound most would have thought impossible.

  John Milton

  Science, Missing, Impossible

  John Milton, Samuel Johnson, John Evans (1799). “Milton's Paradise Lost: With the Life of the Author ; to which is Prefixed the Celebrated Critique by Sam Johnson LLD.”, p.177

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• Jay Harman is the quintessential biomimic, a principled inventor who sees solutions everywhere he looks in the natural world. And he looks deeply, with the soul of a student. He moves with grace from a world of waving sea kelp to the world of sustainable design, bringing nature's wisdom into the board rooms of global companies, to the design tables of the engineers and designers who make our world. This is more than a business book, more than a memoir, more than a new way to solve global challenges. It's a book about a new way to think.

  Janine Benyus

  Moving, Book, Thinking

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• The inventor tries to meet the demand of a crazy civilization.

  Thomas A. Edison

  Crazy, Civilization, Trying

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• A striking feature of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones.

  Alasdair MacIntyre

  Political, Doctrine, World

  Alasdair MacIntyre (2003). “A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the 20th Century”, p.162, Routledge

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• 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.

  Alfred Rosenberg

  Hero, Artist, Blood

  "The Myth of the Twentieth Century". Book by Alfred Rosenberg, p. 5, 1930.

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• Every child has a dream, to pursue the dream is in every child's hand to make it a reality. One's invention is another's tool.

  Samuel Morse

  Dream, Children, Reality

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• AT&T invented the cellular telephone, but saw no future in it. It takes entrepreneurs, who are angels of destruction, to take advantage of things which the inventor cannot or does not see.

  Lester Thurow

  Angel, Entrepreneur, Doe

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• These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.

  Alain de Botton

  Heart, Ideas, Effort

  "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2009.

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• Blessings be the inventor of the alphabet, pen and printing press! Life would be -- to me in all events -- a terrible thing without books.

  Lucy Maud Montgomery

  Book, Blessing, Events

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• Invention is activity of mind, as fire is air in motion; a sharpening of the spiritual sight, to discern hidden aptitudes.

  Martin Farquhar Tupper

  Spiritual, Fire, Sight

  Martin Farquhar Tupper (1839). “Proverbial philosophy: a book of thoughts and arguments”, p.216

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• Both instruments are processors of information. Both appeared when nothing quite like them had existed before, and both began to make their effects felt immediately (a situation that isn't invariable with new technology). Both devices were less the result of a single breakthrough than of an evolving set of technologies. Like the computer, the printing press had no one certain inventor; it was a technology whose time had come.

  Pamela McCorduck

  Technology, Information, Computer

  Pamela McCorduck (1985). “The Universal Machine: Confessions of a Technological Optimist”, New York : McGraw-Hill

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• An inventor is one who can see the applicability of means to supply demand five years before it is obvious to those skilled in the art.

  Reginald Fessenden

  Art, Mean, Years

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• The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

  Alan Kay

  Inspirational, Motivational, Positive

  Walter Isaacson (2011). “Steve Jobs”, p.95, Simon and Schuster

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• Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Self, Greek, Soul

  Jonathan Franzen (2001). “The Corrections: A Novel”, p.312, Macmillan

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• The French revolution was a .eune invented and constructed for the purpose of manufacturing liberty; but it had neither lever cogs, nor adjusting powers, and the consequences were that it worked so rapidly that it destroyed its own inventors, and set itself on fire.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Fire, Liberty, Cogs

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• In other words, what is supposedly found is an invention whose inventor is unaware of his act of invention, who considers it as something that exists independently of him; the invention then becomes the basis of his world view and actions.

  Paul Watzlawick

  Views, World, Action

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• 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.

  Bill Watterson

  Growing Up, Yesterday, Dumb

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• 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.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Fire, Two, People

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Everything Is Illuminated”, p.3, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Thinking, People, Stories

  Interview with David Attwell, www.dn.se. December 8, 2003.

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