To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success ... Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.
An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn't take his education too seriously.
Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.
If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners.
That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.
Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.
The biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.
Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.
This is the patent age of new inventions for killing bodies, and for saving souls. All propagated with the best intentions.
It is no monopoly in any other sense than as a man's own house is a monopoly. But a man's right to his own invention is a very different matter. It is no more a monopoly for him to possess that, than to possess his own homestead .
A new gadget that lasts only five minutes is worth more than an immortal work that bores everyone.
In my own time there have been inventions of this sort, transparent windows tubes for diffusing warmth equally through all parts of a building short-hand, which has been carried to such a perfection that a writer can keep pace with the most rapid speaker. But the inventing of such things is drudgery for the lowest slaves; philosophy lies deeper. It is not her office to teach men how to use their hands. The object of her lessons is to form the soul.
If you build a better mousetrap, you will catch better mice.
The test of an invention is the power of an inventor to push it through in the face of staunch-not opposition, but indifference-in society.
It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes.
Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.
We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - romantic love and gunpowder.
or simply:
