Quotes About Innovation

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration

There are two kinds of fools: One says, This is old therefore it is good. The other one says, This is new therefore it is better.

There are two kinds of fools: one says, "This is old, therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it is better.

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

The brain is evolutionarily hard-wired to do its best daydreaming only when it senses that it is safe to do so—when, in short, it is relaxed. In Kounios's words, "The relaxation phase is crucial.5 That's why so many insights happen during warm showers." Or during Sunday afternoon walks on Glasgow Green, when the idea of a separate condenser seems to have excited the aSTG in the skull of James Watt. Eureka indeed.

Incised in the stone over the Herbert C. Hoover Building's north entrance is the legend that, with Lincoln's characteristic brevity, sums up the single most powerful idea in the world: THE PATENT SYSTEM ADDED THE FUEL OF INTEREST TO THE FIRE OF GENIUS

Boulton's strategic plan was on schedule. He had discerned an opportunity; had exploited it;* and was soon enough unsatisfied by it. By the end of 1782, he had identified the next conquest for the steam engine, an arena whose potential dwarfed that of the mining industry: wheels.

By the 1990s, Ericsson's research was demonstrating2 that the same phenomenon he had first discovered among concert violinists also applied to the creation of innovations: that the cost of becoming consistently productive at creative inventing is ten thousand hours of practice—five to seven years—just as it is for music, athletics, and chess.

Until the first antibiotics, medicine remained the oldest art. It had yet to become, in Thomas's words, the "youngest science.

A few thousand Europeans, no matter how inventive their work in chemicals, or metallurgy, could not create an Industrial Revolution unless they could inspire (or borrow, or even steal) from one another;

The messy truth turns out to be that the innovative culture that blossomed in eighteenth-century Britain depended both on individuals looking out for their own interests, and on recognizing a national interest in innovation.

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.

Adapt your style, if you wish, to admit the color of slang or freshness of neologism, but hang tough on clarity, precision, structure, grace.

All impediments in fancy's courseAre motives of more fancy.

O brave new world,That has such people in't!

Be thou the tenth Muse.

The choice and master spirits of this age.

A man in all the world's new fashion planted, That hath a mint of phrases in his brain.

The Possible's slow fuse is lit By the Imagination.

I love technology.

It is a curious fact that men who know nothing of each other tend to work in the same direction at the same time. Darwin and Wallace, Mendel and de Vries.

Genius is talent provided with ideals.

Poverty plus confidence equals pioneers. We never doubted.