Quotes About Invention

x, n. Doesn't it strike you as strange that we have a letter in the alphabet that nobody uses? It represents one-twenty-sixth of the possibility of our language, and we let it languish. If you and I really, truly wanted to change the world, we'd invent more words that started with x.

So long as we are driven by the need to make up for our needs; by the restless sense that we are not yet fully assured of our place in the world and our hold on its swarming phenomena; so long as there is more to be discovered and made, more to grasp for and make real, we must go on inventing ourselves.

Writers are asked, 'How could you know so much about [fill in the profession]?' The answer, if the writing satisfies, is that one makes it up. And the job, my job, as a dramatist, was not to write accurately, but to write persuasively. If and when I do my job well, subsequent cowboys, as it were, will talk like me.

The problem play is a melodrama cleansed of invention.

The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day.

I felt betrayed, the way you do when you discover that your cat has a secret secondary life and is being fed by neighbors who call him something stupid like Calypso. Worse is that he loves them as much as he loves you, which is to say not at all, really. The entire relationship has been your own invention.

Now it seems cruel, abusive even, but this all happened before the invention of self-esteem, which, frankly, I think is a little overrated.

Bede invented the idea of England, or at least the idea of the English as a single people.

Exploration and invention were the two faces on the coin of progress, and progress was the spirit of the age

Les hommes ont inventé la guerre, la femme a inventé la résistance.

I have not only Arms but a large proportion of Armourers to make.

The PC is going to become one key product in an ever-expanding array of products.

The hat, above all, struck me; it is a sort of truncated column, and does not adapt itself in the least to the shape of the head; but I am told it is easier to bring about a revolution than to invent a graceful hat.

Je ne sais pas ce que je ferai au premier fanatique qui a inventé Dieu.

In vain Pons tried to put in a word; La Cibot talked as the wind blows. Means of arresting steam-engines have been invented, but it would tax a mechanician's genius to discover any plan for stopping a portress' tongue.

Necessity is often the spur to genius.

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas...

Le suicide. Noirceur, nuit blanche, point d'ombre, jour mort. Le suicide supprime ce qui suit, ce qui succède, ce qui menace, ce qui allait venir. Conséquences fatales ne viendront jamais sanctionner leurs causes, ni rectifier la logique des choses. Ce qui se paie restera impayable. Ce qui suit ne suivra plus. Les lendemains éclatent soudain dans une poussière d'impossibilité. Vraiment, le suicide est une grande invention: et je défie qui que ce soit.

You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.

My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.

fun isn't the experience of pleasure, but the outcome of tinkering with a small part of the world in a surprising way. Think

Witches never existed, except in people's minds. All there was in the olden days was women and some men who believed in herbal cures and in folklore and in the wish to fly. Witches? We're all witches in one way or another. Witches was the invention of mankind, son. We're all witches beneath the skin.

Language offers us a surprising, savage terrain full of pockets and peaks. Shakespeare invented words like crazy. Mark Twain wrote in dialect. Muhammad Ali rapped in rhythmic sentences. Junot Diaz mixes Spanish into his sentences like rum into fruit juice. Nicki Minaj spices her lyrics with slang.

Woman's virtue is man's greatest invention.