Quotes About Invention

TELEPHONE n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

Phonograph - An irritating toy that restores life to dead noises.

GUILLOTINE, n. A machine which makes a Frenchman shrug his shoulders with good reason.

I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one's imagination.

Don't copy. Create.

Sometimes I think every man wants to be a writer. They want to invent a world with the perfect imaginary woman, someone they can boss around and undress at will. They can work out their own aggressions with a few fictional rape scenes. Then they can send their fictional surrogate in to save her, a white knight – or a fireman! Someone with all the power and all the agency. Real women, on the other hand, have all these tiresome interests of their own, and won't follow an outline.

So many of man's inventions - the syringe, the sword, the pen, the gun - were metaphorical cocks, but the internal combustion engine had to have been dreamt up by a man who had looked upon the human heart.

Some Arab invented the idea of the number zero," I said. "Isn't that weird? Someone had to think zero up."   Because it isn't obvious—that nothing can be something. That something which can't be measured or seen could still exist and have meaning. Same with the soul, when you think about it.  

If you drive to the end of Little Harbor Road, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, it will take you to the ocean, but you won't find the sandy lane to Camp Wyndham. I made the place up. Many other features of the area, however, are much as I presented them: South Street Cemetery, South Mill Pond, the Piscataqua Bridge. Here and there I have changed features to suit the needs of the story.

The ancient writer Suetonius tells the story that an inventor around 70 CE displayed to a Roman emperor a machine that could move columns, only to be dismissed with the objection that such labor-saving devices would cause the poor to starve by robbing them of employment.

Posterity weaves no garlands for imitators.

were deliberately designed by the smartest people in the world

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.

Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.

You have to invent life.

The place of the arts in the classroom is essential in encouraging invention, ambition, and an understanding of the importance and pleasures of living an examined life.

I enjoy inventing things out of fun. After all, life is a game, not a career.

What a lucky thing the wheel was invented before the automobile; otherwise can you imagine the awful screeching?

Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.

If there were no God, we would have to invent one to keep people sane."*

Anyone can produce a new fact; the thing is to produce a new idea.

The Ice Age lasted for an unimaginably long time. Many tens of thousands of years, which was just as well, for otherwise these people would not have had time to invent all these things. But gradually the earth grew warmer and the ice retreated to the high mountains, and people – who by now were much like us – learnt, with the warmth, to plant grasses and then grind the seeds to make a paste which they could bake in the fire, and this was bread.

Pray don't waste time mourning over me. There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it. Good-bye.

You'll find boredom where there is the absence of a good idea