Inventor Quotes - Page 9

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Histories of the world omitted China; if a Chinaman invented compass or movable type or gunpowder we promptly "forgot it" and named their European inventors. In short, we regarded China as a sort of different and quite inconsequential planet.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Gunpowder, Different, World

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• The creator gives no heed to the critic unless he becomes a barren inventor.

  Khalil Gibran

  Giving, Barren, Critics

  "Spiritual Sayings of Kahlil Gibran". Book by Kahlil Gibran, translated by Anthony R. Ferris, 1962.

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• I'm an inventor. I became interested in long-term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started.

  Ray Kurzweil

  Long, World, Trends

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• I'm not an inventor. I just want to make things better.

  Daniel Ek

  Want

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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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• 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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• 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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• There's a fine line between imagination and reality. An inventor dreams something up, and pretty soon, it's there on the table before him. A science-fiction writer envisions another world, and then some space probe finds it. If you believe in something strongly enough, I think you can make it happen.

  Ridley Pearson

  Dream, Believe, Reality

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• I am quite correctly described as 'more of a sponge than an inventor....'

  Thomas A. Edison

  Motivational, Sponges

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• Don't be afraid to stumble. Any inventor will tell you that you don't follow a plan far before you strike a snag. If, out of 100 ideas you get one that works, it's enough.

  Charles Kettering

  Ideas, Enough, Strikes

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• Back in 1792, Dr. Benjamin Banneker, the famed African-American inventor and scientist in Washington, proposed a Department of Peace for the new Nation to his friends George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. His prophetic suggestion was not implemented; but now, more than 200 years later, the need for a Peace Department is too compelling to ignore.

  John Conyers

  Years, African American, Suggestions

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• Every really able man, in whatever direction he works - a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter - if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be. What is this Better, this flying Ideal, but the perpetual promise of his Creator?

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Inspiration, Creativity, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1870). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.339, Рипол Классик

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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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• 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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