Inventor Quotes - Page 9

• I would consider myself an inventor at heart, or reinventor.

  Josie Maran

  Heart

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• The inventor and the research man are confused because they both examine results of physical or chemical operations. But they are exact opposites, mirror images of one another. The research man does something and does not care [exactly] what it is that happens, he measures whatever it is. The inventor wants something to happen, but does not care how it happens or what it is that happens if it is not what he wants.

  Reginald Fessenden

  Confused, Men, Mirrors

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• At first he who invented any art that went beyond the common perceptions of man was naturally admired by men, not only because there was something useful in the inventions, but because he was thought wise and superior to the rest. But as more arts were invented, and some were directed to the necessities of life, others to its recreation, the inventors of the latter were always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former, because their branches of knowledge did not aim at utility.

  Aristotle

  Wise, Art, Knowledge

  Aristotle (2016). “Pocket Aristotle”, p.114, Simon and Schuster

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• Most inventors and engineers I've met are like me. They're shy and they live in their heads. The very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone.

  Steve Wozniak

  Artist, Working Alone, Shy

  Steve Wozniak (2007). “iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon”, p.290, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I consider myself an inventor, entrepreneur, and author.

  Ray Kurzweil

  Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship

  "Singularity Chat with Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil". Interview in an online chat room co-produced by Analog Science Fiction and Fact and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine on Scifi.com, www.kurzweilai.net. June 11, 2002.

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• Thought experiment is in any case a necessary precondition for physical experiment. Every experimenter and inventor must have the planned arrangement in his head before translating it into fact.

  Ernst Mach

  Science, Facts, Cases

  Ernst Mach (2012). “Knowledge and Error: Sketches on the Psychology of Enquiry”, p.136, Springer Science & Business Media

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• Which was why, some six hours later, Alexia Maccon's daughter was born inside the head of an octomaton in the presence of her husband, a comatose werewolf dandy, and a French inventor.

  Gail Carriger

  Daughter, Husband, Six

  Gail Carriger (2011). “Heartless: Book 4 of The Parasol Protectorate”, p.221, Hachette UK

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• As Arkwright and Whitney were the demi-gods of cotton, so prolific Time will yet bring an inventor to every plant. There is not a property in nature but a mind is born to seek and find it.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Nature, Science, Mind

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2005). “The Selected Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.311, University of Georgia Press

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• Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society . . . but for me and no one else, education means making creators. . . . You have to make inventors, innovators...not conformists

  Jean Piaget

  Children, Mean, People

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• The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.

  Walt Whitman

  College, America, People

  Walt Whitman (2009). “The Americanness of Walt Whitman”, p.50, Wildside Press LLC

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• Time is the best appraiser of scientific work, and I am aware that an industrial discovery rarely produces all its fruit in the hands of its first inventor.

  Louis Pasteur

  Discovery, Hands, Fruit

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• The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Heart, Mirrors, Book Of Disquiet

  Fernando Pessoa (1996). “The Book of Disquietude: By Bernardo Soares, Assistant Bookkeeper in the City of Lisbon”

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• My experience is that inventors come in all sizes, all nationalities, all ages. The only thing I'm sure of is that inventors are always stubborn.

  Robert Dilts

  Being Different, Age, Stubborn

  Robert Dilts, Todd Epstein, Robert W. Dilts (1991). “Tools for dreamers: strategies for creativity and the structure of innovation”, Meta Pubns

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• In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.

  Oscar Wilde

  Disappointment, Crazy, Exercise

  Oscar Wilde, Merlin Holland (2003). “Collins complete works of Oscar Wilde”, HarperCollins UK

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• I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's hands . . . They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain that this application is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This opinion - we shall see - is not altogether false.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Dream, Book, Writing

  Jorge Luis Borges (1962). “Ficciones”, p.81, Grove Press

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• His [Thomas Edison] method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense. In view of this, the truly prodigious amount of his actual accomplishments is little short of a miracle.

  Nikola Tesla

  Sorry, Book, Knowledge

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• I maintain that to-day many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practise the dull craft of experimental psychology.

  Oswald Spengler

  Practice, Psychology, Crafts

  "The Decline of the West: Form and actuality".

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• Never let an inventor run a company. You can never get him to stop tinkering and bring something to market

  E. F. Schumacher

  Running, Business, Tinkering

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• Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part; beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.

  James A. Baldwin

  Clothes, Sorrow, Important

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• Man is the inventor of stupidity.

  Remy de Gourmont

  Funny, Stupid, Men

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• I hope you're as lucky as I am. The world needs inventors--great ones. You can be one. If you love what you do and are willing to do what it really takes, it's within your reach. And it'll be worth every minute you spend alone at night, thinking and thinking about what it is you want to design or build. It'll be worth it, I promise.

  Steve Wozniak

  Motivational, Night, Thinking

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• listen to me as one listens to the rain, the years go by, the moments return, do you hear the footsteps in the next room? not here, not there: you hear them in another time that is now, listen to the footsteps of time, inventor of places with no weight, nowhere, listen to the rain running over the terrace, the night is now more night in the grove, lightning has nestled among the leaves, a restless garden adrift-go in, your shadow covers this page.

  Octavio Paz

  Running, Rain, Night

  Octavio Paz, “As One Listens To The Rain”

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• Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Careers, History, Genius

  "The Idiot". Book by Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1868 - 1869.

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• I am not overly impressed by the great names and reputations of those who might be trying to beat me to an invention. It's their 'ideas' that appeal to me. I am quite correctly described as 'more of a sponge than an inventor

  Thomas A. Edison

  Names, Ideas, Trying

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

  Gene Wilder

  Funny, Humorous, Directors

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