Invention

"The inventor...looks 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."

"A tool is but the extension of a man's hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. And he that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well-being of mankind."

"INVENTOR, n. A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization."

"Originality is going back to the origin and finding an empty chair. Would you gladly sit on it? No thank you. It is empty for a reason. That’s where my ass was. Not where my head is now."

"Se non è vero è ben trovato."

"Someone told me that creativity is just learning to do something with a different perspective."

"Want, the mistress of invention."

"I don't think necessity is the mother of invention — invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble."

"The invention of inventing, it turns out, produces yet more inventions."

"Invention is both the institution of problem solving and advancing human obsolescence. We were naturally selected to replace ourselves."

"All recognized famous inventors had capable predecessors and successors and made their improvements at a time when society was capable of using their product."

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."

"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."

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."

"God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions."

"To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."

"Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor."

"Although it is not, abstractedly speaking, of importance to know who first made a most valuable experiment, or to what individual the community is indebted for the invention of the most useful machine, yet the sense of mankind has in this, as in several other things, been in direct opposition to frigid reasoning; and we are pleased with a recollection of benefits, and with rendering honour to the memory of those who bestowed them. Were public benefactors to be allowed to pass away like hewers of wood and drawers of water, without commemoration, genius and enterprise would be deprived of their most coveted distinction, and after-times would lose incentives to that emulation which urges us to cherish and practise what has been worthy of commendation or imitation in our forefathers; and to make their works, which may have served for a light and been useful to the age in which they lived, a guide and a spur to ourselves"

"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."

"A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience."

"Take the advice of a faithful friend, and submit thy inventions to his censure."

"Technologies needed [to help avoid a climate disaster]: Hydrogen produced without emitting carbon, Grid-scale electricity storage that can last a full season, Electrofuels, Advanced biofuels, Zero-carbon cement, Zero-carbon steel, Plant- and cell-based meat and dairy, Zero-carbon fertilizer, Next-generation nuclear fission, Nuclear fusion, Carbon capture (both direct air capture and point capture), Underground electricity transmission, Zero-carbon plastics, Geothermal energy, Pumped hydro, Thermal storage, Drought- and flood-tolerant food crops, Zero-carbon alternatives to palm oil, [and] Coolants that don’t contain F-gases."

"For many things we can find substitutes, but there is not now, nor will there ever be, a substitute for creative thought."

"The golden hour of invention must terminate like other hours, and when the man of genius returns to the cares, the duties, the vexations, and the amusements of life, his companions behold him as one of themselves—the creature of habits and infirmities."

"There is an unlucky tendency to allow every new invention to add to life's complications, and every new power to increase life’s hustling; so that, unless we can dominate the mischief, we are really the worse off instead of the better."

"Electric telegraphs, printing, gas, Tobacco, balloons, and steam, Are little events that have come to pass Since the days of the old régime. And, spite of Lemprière's dazzling page, I'd give—though it might seem bold— A hundred years of the Golden Age For a year of the Age of Gold."

"Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it."

"Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem."

"Imagination is the outreaching of mind... the bombardment of the conscious mind with ideas, impulses, images and every sort of psychic phenomena welling up from the preconscious. It is the capacity to "dream dreams and see visions...""

"The human imagination leaps to form the whole, to complete the scene in order to make sense of it. The instantaneous way this is done shows how we are driven to construct the remainder of the scene. To fill the gaps is essential if the scene is to have meaning. That we may do this in misleading ways — at times in neurotic or paranoid ways — does not gainsay the central point. Our passion for form expresses our yearning to make the world adequate to our needs and desires, and, more important, to experience ourselves as having significance."

"Creativity perpetually invents itself."

"I have always found It in mine own experience an easier matter to devise manie and profitable inventions, than to dispose of one of them to the good of the author himself."

"May I pack all inventions in burlaps and hide them in corners of Einsteins’ brains."

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple of them and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."

"Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it."

"This is a man's invention and his hand."

"He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers."

"Necessity is the mother of invention."

"We issued gorged with knowledge, and I spoke: 'Why, Sirs, they do all this as well as we." "They hunt old trails" said Cyril, "very well; But when did woman ever yet invent?'"

"Creativity is an integral part of our personality."

"Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma."