Quotes About Ingenuity

I'm telling you, the ingenuity of alcoholics is something else. If only it could be put to some kind of good use. I mean, if you said to an alcoholic, 'Look, the only way for you to get another drink is to cure cancer,' the disease would be history in five seconds.

Los libros se hacen con lo que se tiene y no necesariamente con lo que se quiere.

Bread made of inferior flour, which was occasionally sour, was issued. The meat was rusty bacon or beef-neck. Twice in one year we had good cuts of beef, but it was so far decayed as to be offensive. Occasionally we had a few worm-eaten peas, and twice I saw some small potatoes . . . . Rats were caught in and about the sinks, and sold freely. The slop-barrels were raked, and bread-crusts were fished out, to be dried in the sun and eaten.

Todos mis pupilos deben ser capaces de defender sus ideas. Hagas lo que hagas en la vida, tu ingenio te defenderá más a menudo que una espada. ¡Cultívalo!

Hagas lo que hagas en la vida, tu ingenio te defenderá más a menudo que una espada. ¡Cultívalo!.

No es que espere que salgáis en busca de Haliax y los Siete. «Hombres pequeños, actos pequeños», digo yo siempre. Imagino que el problema reside en encontrar un trabajo lo bastante pequeño para unos hombres como vosotros. Pero tenéis recursos. Podríais recoger basura, o mirar si hay piojos en las camas de los burdeles cuando los visitáis.

When I arrived, Kilvin was in the process of bending a twisted length of iron rod into what I could only assume was a more desirable shape.

You get things done. Not always the best way, or the most sensible way, but it gets done nonetheless. You're a rare creature.

We also usually got the best results, probably because not only do we think outside the box, we trample it, change its shape, hide it from all its loved ones, and then hold it for ransom.

That's American know-how for you. It keeps coming at you, and every minute there's new junk to push out the old junk.

Everyone is broken-hearted except for the drastically unimaginative

And if you think about it, pretty much everything that made the twentieth century bearable was invented in a California garage: the Apple computer, the Boogie Board

John Quincy Adams strove to escape commonplace thoughts.

The first rule to tinkering is to save all the parts.

We were doing the best we could with what we had left, and more and more it was like Diogenes tossing away the tin cup because he could drink with his hands. It turns out there is no end to learning what you can do without.

Frequently, trite ideas or unimaginative translation of those ideas is the result not of poor subject matter but of poor interpretation of a problem.

That's the secret of creativity. You have to steal around. If you keep going back to that same 7-Eleven, they're going to catch you. So you go over to the floral shop, the gas station that nobody ever goes to, and you steal all this shit, and you put it together and people say, "Wow." They think it's yours.

Stupidity is not my strong point.

Entrer chez les gens pour déconcerter leurs idées, leur faire la surprise d'être surpris de ce qu'ils font, de ce qu'ils pensent, et qu'ils n'ont jamais conçu différent, c'est, au moyen de l'ingénuité feinte ou réelle, donner à ressentir toute la relativité d'une civilisation, d'une confiance habituelle dans l'ordre établi.

Don't let self-imposed, unnecessary restrictions limit your thinking. Whenever you encounter a problem, it is worth spending a minute (or more) asking the question: 'Am I imposing rules that I don't need to? Can I change or bend the rules to my advantage?

When they lock the door, climb out the window. – Mr. Morrison, volunteer at the Humane Society

Instead of begging OPEC to drop its oil prices, let's use American leadership and ingenuity to solve our own energy problems.

Pitting the learning of basic knowledge against the development of creative thinking is a false choice. Both need to be cultivated. The stronger one's knowledge about the subject at hand, the more nuanced one's creativity can be in addressing a new problem. Just as knowledge amounts to little without the exercise of ingenuity and imagination, creativity absent a sturdy foundation of knowledge builds a shaky house.

Science your way out of this.