Quotes About Resourcefulness

Don't spend your time fetching water with a basket for it will never get filled up

How do you keep ninety people together with one stick? I've got two sticks and I can't keep five people together.

Akismet started on a $70 dollar-a-month server. Anyone can scrape together $70.

Inspiration can be found in a pile of junk. Sometimes, you can put it together with a good imagination and invent something.

Engineers don't go to confession when they screw up; they find a fix.

Ability to Function Despite Imminent Catastrophe.

Members of the 1860 Burke and Wills expedition to cross Australia fell prey to scurvy or starved in part because they refused to eat what the indigenous Australians ate. Bugong-moth abdomen and witchetty grub may sound revolting, but they have as much scurvy-battling vitamin C as the same size serving of cooked spinach, with the additional benefits of potassium, calcium, and zinc.

Until Oklahoma! they were, despite the money he made, always very hand-to-mouth, a situation my mother managed with great agility, a nose for bargains, and a flair for double-entry bookkeeping. I used to brag about that last one, having no idea what it meant.

They had had about enough time to get their bearings and blow up one train when they ran out of food supplies.

Okay… This looks bad. You cowboy around with the Avengers some. Guys got, what, armor. Magic. Super-powers. Super-strength. Shrink-dust. Grow-rays. Magic. Healing factors. I'm an orphan raised by carnies fighting with a stick and a string from the Paleolithic era. So when I say this looks "bad"? I promise you it feels worse.

If you were stranded on an island, what 3 things would you bring with you?

In 2009, an artist named Thomas Thwaites set out to make his own toaster, of the sort that he could buy from a shop for about £4.

Imagine if you had to be completely self-sufficient (not just pretending, like Thoreau).

If you can store the labour of others for future use, then you can spare yourself the time and the energy of working for your own immediate needs

If you can store the labour of others for future use, then you can spare yourself the time and the energy of working for your own immediate needs, which means you can invest in something new that will bring even greater reward.

Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month,' Henry David Thoreau asked: 'the boy who had made his own jack-knife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this – or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers' penknife from his father?

You'd be surprised, you can do a lot more damage with your brains than with your fists.

We have to build our lives out of what materials we have. It's as though we were given a heap of blocks and told to build a house.

Instead of building new furnaces, thought Rearden, he was now running a losing race to keep the old ones going; instead of starting new ventures, new research, new experiments in the use of Rearden Metal, he was spending the whole of his energy on a quest for sources of iron ore: like the men at the dawn of the Iron Age—he thought—but with less hope.

There was a time, she thought, when his mind, his energy, his inexhaustible resourcefulness had been given to the task of a producer devising better ways to deal with nature; now, they were switched to the task of a criminal outwitting men. She wondered how long a man could endure a change of that kind.

make away out of no way

instilled early in my childhood—her go-to move anytime I complained of boredom, or when she couldn't afford to send me to the international school in Indonesia, or when I had to accompany her to the office because she didn't have a babysitter. Go read a book, she would say. Then come back and tell me something you learned.

They're not trying to get filthy rich. They don't expect someone else to do what they can do for themselves.

Be sweet and carry a sharp knife, was her motto.