Quotes About Invention

It has today occurred to me that an amplifier using semiconductors rather than vacuum is in principle possible.[Laboratory notebook, 29 Dec 1939.]

My advice is to look out for engineers - they begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb.

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.

The written word may be man's greatest invention. It allows us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn.

Writing is the great invention of the world.

but also thought of everything, invented everything and changed everything.

I took the initiative in creating the Internet

it is seldom at the frontier that discoveries are made but more often in the dustbin.

When there is a need for heroes and they are so inconsiderate as not to invent themselves, others take up the task for them.

The clothes you're wearing, the room, the house, the city that you're in. Everything in it started out in the human imagination. Your lives, your personalities, your whole world. All invented. All made up. All the wars, the romances. The masterpieces and the machines. And there's nothing here but a funny little twist of amino acids, playing a marvelous game of pretend.

Wherever did these jumped-up monkeys get all their ideas from?

one of the first light bulbs ever manufactured remains lit, over a hundred years after it was first switched on.

Sances lost their popularity with the invention of infrared photography when it became possible to see what mediums were doing in the dark. Nowadays, spiritualists fakery is more ambiguous and subtle.

We like to think of this as the conquest of bestial weaknesses by the powers of intellectual altruism, as if ethics and morality were some kind of modern invention. If this were really true, it is doubtful if we would be here today to proclaim it. If we did not carry in us the basic biological urge to co-operate with our fellow men, we would never have survived as a species.

Dad says that everyone invented baklava." It occurs to me now to wonder what that means. Aunt Aya rolls her eyes. "Your father? He is the worst of the worst. He thinks he cooks and eats Arabic food but these walnuts were not grown from Jordanian earth and this butter was not made from Jordanian lambs. He is eating the shadow of a memory. He cooks to remember but the more he eats, the more he forgets.

If we are encouraged to read high fantasies like The Tempest and urged to "enjoy a magic island and 'believe' in an Ariel and a Caliban," then why should we not also "suspend our disbelief" and enjoy the invented world of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings? Why not enter in and believe also in the magic of barrow-wights and orc-blades, Hobbiton, Tom Bombadil, and the tree-top city of Lothlórien?

Babbage never foresaw the terrible consequences of his invention, a machine that would autocorrect his name to cabbage, every single time.

Writing is more about discovery than invention.

An image needs a living object, and a copy can only be formed from a model. Either man models himself on the god of his own invention, or the true and living God moulds the human form in his image. There must be a complete transformation, a 'metamorphosis' (Rom. 12:2; 2 Cor. 3:18), if man is to be restored to the image of God.

An image needs a living object, and a copy can only be formed from a model. Either man models himself on the god of his own invention, or the true and living God moulds the human form into his image. There must be a complete transformation, a "metamorphosis" (Rom. 12.2; II Cor. 3.18), if man is to be restored to the image of God.