«About Invention and Inventors»

Where a new invention promises to be useful, it ought to be tried.

Thomas Jefferson

Being ignorant is not so much a shame as being unwilling to learn.

Benjamin Franklin

Invention is activity of mind, as fire is air in motion; a sharpening of the spiritual sight, to discern hidden aptitudes.

Martin Farquhar Tupper

If necessity is the mother of invention, discontent is the father of progress.

David Rockefeller

When you can do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.

George Washington

Every child has a dream, to pursue the dream is in every child’s hand to make it a reality. One’s invention is another’s tool...

Samuel Morse

A tool is but the extension of a man’s hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. And he that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well-being of mankind.

Henry Ward Beecher

I like my job because it involves learning. I like being around smart people who are trying to figure out new things. I like the fact that if people really try they can figure out how to invent things that actually have an impact.

Bill Gates

Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.

Thomas Edison

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Marie Curie

Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man’s greatness lies in his power of thought.

Blaise Pascal

Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.

Marie Curie

My main purpose in life is to make enough money to create ever more inventions....

Thomas Edison

The right of an inventor to his invention is no monopoly - in any other sense than a man’s house is a monopoly.

Daniel Webster

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Alan Kay

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

Shakespeare

Doubt is the father of invention.

Galileo

There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry.

Henry Miller

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 had ever invented — human liberty.

Mark Twain

Mothers are the necessity of invention.

Bill Watterson

Before then any man might instantly use what another had invented; so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention. The patent system changed this; secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things.

Abraham Lincoln

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

Jonathon Swift

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

Aristotle

Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.

Alexander Graham Bell

If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there will be little of advance.

Orville Wright

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success... Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

Nikola Tesla

To make an apple pie from scratch, we must first invent the universe.

Carl Sagan

When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.

Alexander Graham Bell

We have all heard of Young America. He is the most current youth of the age. Some think him conceited, and arrogant; but has he not reason to entertain a rather extensive opinion of himself? Is he not the inventor and owner of the present, and sole hope of the future?

Abraham Lincoln