Selected invention quotes

1. To tell the truth, the chariot was an astonishing sight to behold, because I had polished the steel of my flying house so carefully that it reflected the sunlight on all sides. It was so bright and dazzling that I thought, myself, that I had been carried away in a chariot of fire.

2. Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.

3. The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.

4. The real truths are those that can be invented.

5. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?

6. And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.

7. I invented the cordless extension cord.

8. All invention and progress comes from finding a link between two ideas that have never met.

9. Young men are fitter to invent than to judge, fitter for execution than for counsel, and fitter for new projects than for settled business.

10. Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.

11. The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, 'You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I'm just not close enough to get the job done.'

12. Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory: nothing can come of nothing.

13. 'One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could build anything beginning with the letter 'n'.'

14. Invention flags, his brain goes muddy, And black despair succeeds brown study.

15. I don't research anything. If I need something, I'll invent it.

16. It is a fraud of the Christian system to call the sciences human invention; it is only the application of them that is human. Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles, he can only discover them.

17. And is Man any the less destroying himself for all this boasted brain of his? Have you walked up and down upon the earth lately? I have; and I have examined Man's wonderful inventions. And I tell you that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. The peasant I tempt to-day eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady's bonnet in a score of weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers far behind.

18. Fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.

19. Necessity may be the mother of lucrative invention, but it is the death of poetical.

20. That's an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?

21. There is good evidence that the art of shooting with bows and arrows has not been handed down from any common progenitor of mankind, yet as Westropp and Nilsson have remarked, the stone arrow-heads, brought from the most distant parts of the world, and manufactured at the most remote periods, are almost identical; and this fact can only be accounted for by the various races having similar inventive or mental powers.

22. Bob de Graff, who started Pocket Books, had a patent on a non-re-readable book, bound like a sealed memo pad, from which you would tear each page after you'd read it.

23. 'It is when Guralnick shows how young Elvis made his way through this cultural briar patch, that we get what we need. He got voluptuous phrasing and ecstatic self-confidence from gospel, wit and menace from the blues, homespun sincerity from country and, from what we can now call gay theatrics, he got glamour and self-parody. He played the outlaw and the good son. How he flirts with his audiences, first being casual, fervent, sneering, then inviting us to laugh at, or with him. ?As you desire me?, he is saying, ?so shall I be?. Was he a great performer? Yes and yes again. He galvanized rock-and-roll and made you feel the fun and the risk and all the contradictions. That's self-invention, and that's entertainment.'

24. If it is not true it is very well invented.

25. It is not true, it is a happy invention.

26. C'est par la logique qu'on demontre, c'est par l'intuition qu'on invente.

27. [on the greatest invention] Liquid Prell.

28. I invented something called The Oxford Muse. The Muses were women in mythology. They did not teach or require to be worshipped, but they were a source of inspiration. They taught you how to cultivate your emotions through the different arts in order to reach a higher plane. What is lacking now, I believe, is somewhere you can get that stimulation not information, but stimulation where you can meet just that person, or find just that situation, which will give you the idea of invention, of carrying out some project which interests you, and show how it can become a project of interest to other people.

29. Not far from the invention of fire must rank the invention of doubt.

30. They claim to be the first inventors of those recondite beverages, cocktail, stonefence, and sherry cobbler.

31. Who are the inventors of Tlon? The plural is inevitable, because the hypothesis of a lone inventor - an infinite Leibniz laboring away darkly and modestly - has been unanimously discounted. It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers... directed by an obscure man of genius. Individuals mastering these diverse disciplines are abundant, but not so those capable of inventiveness and less so those capable of subordinating that inventiveness to a rigorous and systematic plan. This plan is so vast that each writer's contribution is infinitesimal. At first it was believed that Tlon was a mere chaos, and irresponsible license of the imagination; now it is known that it is a cosmos and that the intimate laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally. Let it suffice for me to recall that the apparent contradictions of the Eleventh Volume are the fundamental basis for the proof that the other volumes exist, so lucid and exact is the order observed in it.

32. Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.

33. I don't think necessity is the mother of invention - invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.

34. The inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the manmade sound never equalled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig.

35. 'So look I did this yesterday, I spin a twig and it makes smoke and it makes orange and yellow stuff, and its kinda warm. I'm going to be famous, Sheila!' 'You're not either, come and have your salad.' 'I'm going to! invent this, and:' 'Jeff Fire!, You are not going to be famous!' 'I am Sheila! And you know what? I'm going to call it Jeff!

36. On a toujours cherche des explications quand c'etait des representations qu'on pouvait seulement essaye d'inventer.

37. During all those years of experimentation and research, I never once made a discovery. All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention, pure and simple. I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it was untenable. Then it would be discarded at once and another theory evolved. This was the only possible way for me to work out the problem. ... I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty was in constructing the carbon filament. . . . Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials used, until finally the shred of bamboo, now utilized by us, was settled upon.

38. Through all the years of experimenting and research, I never once made a discovery. I start where the last man left off. ... All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention pure and simple.

39. To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

40. I find out what the world needs. Then, I go ahead and invent it.