Quotes About Innovation

Miss Frumkin rummaged through her bag looking for a spoon. She seemed to be aware that there was no spoon in the bag, but she insisted on rummaging anyway. Finding no spoon, she took out her toothbrush and began to eat the yogurt with the toothbrush. Miss O'Reilly laughed at her. Miss Frumkin didn't seem to mind. "They laughed at Bell and they laughed at Edison," she said, throwing the toothbrush into the wastebasket. She finished eating the yogurt with her fingers.

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.

We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new? [ Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade) , Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]

Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling "traditions"; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician's discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as "identities" that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

The function of writing is to explode one's subject—transform it into something else. (Writing is a series of transformations).

Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.

Art Nouveau objects, typically, convert one thing into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of flowering plants, the living room which is really a grotto. A remarkable example: the Paris Métro entrances designed by Hector Guimard in the late 1890s in the shape of cast-iron orchid stalks.

Perhaps the way one tells how alive a particular art form is, is by the latitude it gives for making mistakes in it

Perhaps the way one tells how alive a particular art form is, is by the latitude it gives for making mistakes in it and still being good.

The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.

At the moment when "art" comes into being, the modern period of art begins.

Reproducing nature slavishly is not art.

Things will change, Father. They must. And art can help create the change.

Styles are merely the copying of what others have done, perhaps done better than we. God has given us our talents so as not to copy the talents of others, but rather to use our own imagination to obtain the revelation of True Beauty.

I have not failed, I've just found ten thousand ways that don't work." (Thomas Edison); "You can win a lot in life just by being the last one to give up." (James Clear); "Failure is success in progress." (Albert Einstein). No

the best ideas are big ideas that come straight from your gut, not your head. Ideas that give you big feelings.

What a joy life is when you have made a close working partnership with Nature, helping her to produce for the benefit of mankind new forms, colors, and perfumes in flowers which were never known before; fruits in form, size, and flavor never before seen on this globe. -Luther Burbank.

What a joy life is when you have made a close working partnership with Nature, helping her to produce for the benefit of mankind new forms, colors, and perfumes in flowers which were never known before; fruits in form, size, and flavor never before seen on this globe."—Luther Burbank. "It's the

Real intelligence is a creative use of knowledge, not merely an accumulation of facts. The slow thinker who can finally come up with an idea of his own is more important to the world than a walking encyclopedia who hasn't learned how to use this information productively.

This is the genius of my enemy! Lock a door against him and all that happens is that he learns first how to pick a lock and second how to build a better one against you!

Abandoning the search for the Knowledge would free us to pursue a new sort of science. We could follow any path that the data suggested to us.

Mr Norrell was delighted. He did not believe that anyone had ever proposed such a piece of magic before and begged Sir Walter to convey his compliments to Lord Castlereagh as the possessor of a most original brain.

The President of the York society (whose name was Dr Foxcastle) turned to John Segundus and explained that the question was a wrong one. "It presupposes that magicians have some sort of duty to do magic – which is clearly nonsense. You would not, I imagine, suggest that it is the task of botanists to devise more flowers? Or that astronomers should labour to rearrange the stars? Magicians, Mr Segundus, study magic which was done long ago. Why should any one expect more?