Quotes About Resourcefulness

I had never handled a tool in my life, and yet in time, by labour, application, and contrivance, I found at last that I wanted nothing but I could have made it.

we baked all our own bread;

I mean that in the absence of food, baboons will organize themselves to find a meal, but in the absence of leopards they will never organize themselves to find a leopard.

I prefer to think about problems the way engineers do. If a valve doesn't work, they don't say, "Well, we must have valves, so let's try two valves." If a valve doesn't work, they say, "Well, what would work?" Their rule is, if it doesn't work, don't do it more, do something else.

A lot of people ask me if I were shipwrecked, and could only have one book, what would it be? I always say 'How to Build a Boat.'

Your actions and approach with what you have, will showcase to others what you would be able to do with more.

The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.

The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones, and the age of oil won't end because we run out of oil.

Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems.

Don't look for the state of the art most expensive cameras. You should be capable today with fairly simple equipment of high caliber. You can edit on your own laptop, and you can make a film yourself for, let's say, even a feature film under $10,000. Learn from the documentary film school. Really didn't have any equipment or any money.

to the best account; it is an unintelligent waste of strength.

Of what are you thinking?" Peary asked one of his Eskimo guides. "I do not have to think," was the answer; "I have plenty of meat." Not to think unless we have to—there is much to be said for this as the summation of wisdom.

Cash is filling up the holes he bored in the top of it. He is trimming out plugs for them, one at a time, the wood wet and hard to work. He could cut up a tin can and hide the holes and nobody wouldn't know the difference. Wouldn't mind, anyway. I have seen him spend a hour trimming out a wedge like it was glass he was working, when he could have reached around and picked up a dozen sticks and drove them into the joint and made it do.

Two, it seemed, could not live nearly as cheaply as one, especially if that one had been accustomed to subsisting on whatever fell to hand, spending what little money he did have in secondhand bookstores.

I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans

I only wanted to keep up a fire!

I just know once you're over your emotional outbursts, you'll come up with-' I mean if we even had a wheelbarrow, that would be something,' Westley said.

I mean if we even had a wheelbarrow, that would be something.

Your job is to get villains. Right? You'll have to know what to do. If you don't know, you have to find out. If you can't find out you bloody well make it up and then you make it so.

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.

A clever person turns great troubles into little ones and little ones into none at all.

Don't waste good iron for nails or good men for soldiers

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life.

created this framework to be useful for people who don't have scads of authority or resources. Some people can get their way by fiat. CEOs, for instance, can