Invention Quotes

And yet the true creator is necessity, which is the mother of invention.

Work is a necessity for man. Man invented the alarm clock.

For once you are going to hear a dream, a dream that I have made sound... I dreamed all this; never could my poor head have invented such a thing.

Although human ingenuity may devise various inventions which, by the help of various instruments, answer to one and the same purpose, yet will it never discover any inventions more beautiful, more simple or more practical than those of nature, because in her inventions there is nothing lacking and nothing superfluous; and she makes use of no counterpoise when she constructs the limbs of animals in such a way as to correspond to the motion of their bodies, but she puts into them the soul of the body.

If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture.

It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes.

The spinning wheel is itself an exquisite piece of machinery. My head daily bows in reverence to its unknown inventor.

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.

The inventor can't do it all, you've got to change people. We have an enormous capacity to invent super-machinery. But our desire to install the device is weak. Human inertia is the problem, not invention. Something in man makes him resist change.

The greatest Inventions were produced in Times of Ignorance; as the Use of the Compass, Gunpowder, and Printing; and by the dullest Nation, as the Germans.

Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.

Of all my inventions, I liked the phonograph best

Above all, innovation is not invention. It is a term of economics rather than of technology.

The greatest invention in the world is the mind of a child.

The series of integers is obviously an invention of the human mind, a self-created tool which simplifies the ordering of certain sensory experiences.

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.

I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.

Every inventor is a crackpot until his idea succeeds.

Invention breeds invention. No sooner is the electric telegraph devised than gutta-percha, the very material it requires, is found. The aeronaut is provided with gun-cotton, the very fuel he wants for his balloon.

I invented the cordless extension cord.

I have damaged my intellect trying to imagine why a man should want to invent a repeating clock, and how another man could be found to lust after it and buy it. The man who can guess these riddles is far on the way to guess why the human race was invented - which is another riddle which tires me.

The US patent system adds the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery and production of new and useful things

I sat in a garage and invented the future.

The hounding of a dog pursuing a fox or other animal in the horizon may have first suggested the notes of the hunting-horn to alternate with and relieve the lungs of the dog. This natural bugle long resounded in the woods of the ancient world before the horn was invented.

When Thomas Edison worked late into the night on the electric light, he had to do it by gas lamp or candle. I'm sure it made the work seem that much more urgent.

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

My main purpose in life is to make enough money to create ever more inventions…. The dove is my emblem…. I want to save and advance human life, not destroy it…. I am proud of the fact that I have never invented weapons to kill….

I am quite correctly described as 'more of a sponge than an inventor....'

The most amazing and effective inventions are not those which do most honour to the human genius.

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

There have been three great inventions since the beginning of time: fire, the wheel, and central banking.

The very existence of flamethrowers proves that sometime, 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".

Before they invented drawing boards, what did they go back to?

I believe that there never was a creator of a philosophical system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men that the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas.

It must be confessed that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men than the inventors of syllogisms.

Necessity is literally the mother of invention.

Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age.

I have no private interest in the reception of my inventions by the world, having never made, nor proposed to make, the least profit by any of them.

One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games.

The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.

I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent it

Some guy invented Vitamin A out of a carrot. I'll bet he can't invent a good meal out of one.

None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.

In whatever system where the weight attached to the wheel should be the cause of motion of the wheel, without any doubt the center of the gravity of the weight will stop beneath the center of its axle. No instrument devised by human ingenuity, which turns with its wheel, can remedy this effect. Oh, speculators about perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you created in the like quest. Go and take you place with the seekers after gold.

I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others... I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent.

In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances, invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.

Invention breeds invention.

Nor age so eat up my invention.

At first he who invented any art that went beyond the common perceptions of man was naturally admired by men, not only because there was something useful in the inventions, but because he was thought wise and superior to the rest. But as more arts were invented, and some were directed to the necessities of life, others to its recreation, the inventors of the latter were always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former, because their branches of knowledge did not aim at utility.

It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing-and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite - that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.

Science burrows its insulted head in the filth of slaughterous inventions.

I never once made a discovery ... I speak without exaggeration that I have constructed three thousand different theories in connection with the electric light ... Yet in only two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory.

There shall be wings! If the accomplishment be not for me, 'tis for some other. The spirit cannot die; and man, who shall know all and shall have wings.

The greatest inventions are those inquiries which tend to increase the power of man over matter.

I'm one of those people that think Thomas Edison and the light bulb changed the world more than Karl Marx ever did.

For without invention, no one was ever a great man in his own trade.

Very learned women are to be found, in the same manner as female warriors; but they are seldom or ever inventors.

At the Egyptian city of Naucratis there was a famous old god whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis was sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters.

Mr Edison gave America just what was needed at that moment in history. They say that when people think of me, they think of my assembly line. Mr. Edison, you built an assembly line which brought together the genius of invention, science and industry.

Men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work least, for they are thinking out inventions.