#Invention Quotes

“Nor age so eat up my invention.”

“Invention breeds invention.”

“One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.”

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

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

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

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

“The fact is that one new idea leads to another, that to a third and so on through a course of time, until someone, with whom no one of these ideas was original, combines all together, and produces what is justly called a new invention.”

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

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

“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.”

“We are striking it big in the electric light, better than my vivid imagination first conceived. Where this thing is going to stop Lord only knows.”

“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.”

“I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. Long experience proved that there were great drawbacks found generally before they could be got commercial; but here was something there was no doubt of.”

“The inventor tries to meet the demand of a crazy civilization.”

“Invention is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.”

“Of all my inventions, I liked the phonograph best”

“Radio is just a fashion contrivance that will soon die out. It is obvious that there never will be invented a proper receiver!”

“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….”

“It has been just so in all my inventions. The first step is an intuition-and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise. This thing that gives out and then that-"Bugs"as such little faults and difficulties are called show themselves and months of anxious watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success-or failure-is certainly reached.”

“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.”

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

“Let the public throw bouquets to the inventors and in time we will all be happy.”

“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.”

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

“I try not to invent things that people don't need.”

“One might think that the money value of an invention constitutes its reward to the man who loves his work. But... I continue to find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.”

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

“I never pick up an item without thinking of how I might improve it. I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others. I want to save and advance human life, not destroy it. I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill. The dove is my emblem.”

“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.”

“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.”

“My main purpose in life is to make money so I can afford to go on creating more inventions.”

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

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

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

“I am more of a sponge than an inventor. I absorb ideas from every source. I take half-matured schemes for mechanical development and make them practical. I am a sort of a middleman between the long-haired and impractical inventor and the hard-headed business man who measures all things in terms of dollars and cents. My principal business is giving commercial value to the brilliant but misdirected ideas of others.”

“I invented the cordless extension cord.”

“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.”

“I sat in a garage and invented the future.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Necessity is literally the mother of invention.”